“Off-the-shelf” features and pragmatic trajectories: The years of cioè in Italian

Abstract

Linguistic variants have a ‘social’ value if alternants are “easily parsed, extracted, and recombined-taken off the shelf” (Eckert, 2019: 755). In this process indexicality is central as it connects (linguistic) signs to social occasions, anchoring language use into social patterns. Discourse markers, central elements within pragmatics, display formal and functional properties which make them ideal for identity construction and negotiation of social meaning. This contribution considers how social meaning aligns with the prototypically pragmatic meaning of discourse markers through the exemplar development of Italian cioè ‘that is’ from 1976 to today. Basing the analysis on spoken corpora and questionnaires on speakers' attitudes, the study shows that the social meaning of cioè is anchored in linguistic practices of social groups, which entail uses in different structural contexts, positions, and with different scopes. It also links the pragmatic development of cioè to the evolution of its social indexicalities. Lastly, it discusses the role of discourse markers, and of pragmatic variables, in the development of social personae and in the relationship of social meaning with indexicality. If the latter is the use of linguistic correlations to do social work, the former is its outcome in particular instances.