Allocution as vehicle of subjectivity in language: the case of emphasis and mirativity

Abstract

This paper sets out to explore some de-verbal parentheticals, here defined comment clauses, which are mobilised to express the speaker’s evaluative stance. Such structures are of interest since they contain verbs (generally) in the imperative form and are used to express speaker-oriented meanings through forms that by routinization refer to the phatic and intersubjective dimension of communication (attention-getting and so forth). We refer to parentheticals such as guarda (‘look’) and sai (‘you know’), which adopt emphasis functions in discourse through a validation requested to the hearer generally in co-occurrence with evaluative utterances. Moreover, we seek to elucidate the profile of strategies such as pensa (te) (‘just imagine’), which is used to express surprise with respect to an unexpected and/or new content. In such developments a crucial role is played by grammaticalization and routinization processes essentially through conventionalization of invited inferences. The output of such processes is the expression of evaluative stance on the part of the speaker through inherently interactive strategies.