Epistemic, Evaluative, Speech Act Adverbs and Italian Political Language

Francesca La Forgia

doi:10.13092/lo.92.4508

Abstract

This paper focuses on a group of Italian adverbs ending in -mente whose general function is to convey the speaker/writer’s stance towards what is being said or written: Its purpose is to offer a preliminary description of how epistemic, evaluative and speech act adverbs are used in a specific genre of political discourse: parliamentarians’ speeches during sessions of the Assemblea of the Italian Chamber of Deputies. Since these speeches have an argumentative communicative intention and are highly planned texts, they constitute a potentially favourable environment to observe how these adverbs contribute to building the argumentation, handling agreements and disagreements, and supporting or rejecting opinions.More precisely, I will analyse epistemic adverbs that express doubt and certainty, such as probabilmente (‘probably’) and certamente (‘certainly’); epistemic adverbs that express the source of knowledge, such as ovviamente (‘obviously’) and evidentemente (‘evidently’); evaluative content-oriented adverbs like sfortunatamente (‘unfortunately’); participant-oriented adverbs like giustamente (‘justly’/‘rightly’); and speech act adverbs such as francamente (‘frankly’).

Highlights

1 Introduction This paper focuses on a particular group of Italian adverbs formed with the suffix -mente and generally labelled as sentence adverbs, insofar as their scope extends to whole sentences affecting, in different ways, their propositional content
The purpose of this paper is to offer an initial description of how these adverbs are used in a specific genre of political discourse: parliamentarians’ speeches during sessions of the Assemblea of the Italian Chamber of Deputies
The main purpose of this paper was to provide a first general description of the way epistemic, evaluative and speech act adverbs are used in a specific genre of political speech which is an argumentative text-type, and a favourable environment for the use of the aboveclasses

Summary

Introduction

This paper focuses on a particular group of Italian adverbs formed with the suffix -mente (equivalent to the English: suffix -ly) and generally labelled as sentence adverbs (or sentence adverbials), insofar as their scope extends to whole sentences affecting, in different ways, their propositional content. The purpose of this paper is to offer an initial description of how these adverbs are used in a specific genre of political discourse: parliamentarians’ speeches during sessions of the Assemblea of the Italian Chamber of Deputies.. It is very common to find intertextual references to what has been said by others with explicit realisation of agreement and disagreement within each speech These last three characteristics make this textual/discursive genre a potentially favourable environment for using the adverbs being analysed here. Since these texts/speeches are highly planned, they are sufficiently structured and organised to observe how these adverbs contribute to building the argumentation, handling agreements and disagreements, and supporting or rejecting opinions. Francesca La Forgia: Epistemic, Evaluative, Speech Act Adverbs and Italian Political Language147

Theoretical Framework and Classification of Sentence Adverbs

Evaluative and Speech Act Adverbs

Findings

Conclusions