Managing turns, building common ground, planning discourse

Abstract

This paper discusses the discursive and interpersonal functions conveyed by the Italian negative operator no(?) ‘no’, suggesting a possible pathway of functional enrichment that can account for its high degree of polyfunctionality. Drawing on the KIParla corpus of contemporary spoken Italian, we chart the values of no(?) as a discourse marker, which are all clearly connected to the incremental co-construction of discourse in interaction, either in terms of turn management or of shared knowledge and mutual alignment. We then explore its sociolinguistic distribution, showing that register variation plays a major role in this respect. We argue that conversational uses of no(?) as a discourse marker, including its role as a pause-filler, are motivated by cooperative needs in discourse construction, shaping its functional profile at the intersection of mental processes and communicative practices.