Ma proposes and però diposes: Something more than an increase in intensity

Abstract

The Italian grammatical tradition has assumed that ma and però have the same meaning. They are interchangeable since the only difference between them is related to the force or the emphasis that the speaker wants to put in the utterance. Based on the Theory of Argumentation (Anscombre / Ducrot 1980), Cognitive Grammar and the Theory of Subjectivization (Langacker 1985), we suggest that both conjunctions operate in different contexts and designate differentiable meanings which are linked to different pragmatic activations that surpass the alleged distinction based on the degree of intensity or emphasis. In contrast, they differ in terms of their scope, which is narrow for ma and open for però. Based on the observation of 600 cases of però in oral language, we will show that però focuses on broader informative media than ma. The scope of però incorporates the relationship of all the participants either in the event or in the communicative context, and thus it highlights the (self)-evaluative view of the speaker, who retrieves all the associations related to the event. While ma exhibits a restricted scope, the subjectivity of però presupposes a wide scope that allows the incorporation of encyclopedic inferences which are outside the scope of ma and are linked to the sphere of the speaker and, eventually, the hearer.