Once known, always known. Turn-final sai in North-East regional Italian

Abstract

This paper focuses on the structural and functional properties of a positionally flexible verb-based discourse marker, sai (lit. ‘you know’), which in its turn-final position is a conversational hallmark of the regional variety of Standard Italian spoken in and around Padova, in the north-eastern region of Veneto. Drawing from a series of distributional and scopal constraints (including the interaction with other turn-initial and turn-final verb-based discourse markers, vocative phrases, verum focus, and the negative polarity item mica), it is claimed that both turn-initial and turn-final sai are best analyzed as intersubjectively-oriented Common Ground management operators (Repp, Sophie. 2013. Common ground management: Modal particles, illocutionary negation and verum. In Daniel Gutzmann & Hans-Martin Gärtner (eds.), Beyond expressives: explorations in use-conditional meaning (Current Research in the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface 28), 231–274. Leiden & Boston: Brill) activated by Speaker’s salient presuppositional biases of opposite polarity. Syntactically, within Interactional Spine Hypothesis (Wiltschko, Martina. 2021. The grammar of interactional language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), it is shown how both turn-initial and turn-final sai are base-generated above the C system, in the specifier position of the lower (Speaker-oriented) field of the so-called GroundP, and then moved up to the specifier position of the higher (Addressee-oriented) GroundP; additionally, the mild-rising intonational contour associated with turn-final sai is claimed to perform a call on the Addressee, which activates the corresponding Resp(onse)P above GroundP. These results contribute to the available literature on the micropragmatic process of construction and negotiation of context-bound evidential meanings, also as a tool to foster manipulative processes.