Pre-concessives in dialogue, monologue and ‘hybrid constructions’

Abstract

Though ‘frozen’ in monological written texts, some grammatical constructions still show traces of the dialogical prototypical situation of the utterance, based on face-to-face oral interaction between speaker and hearer. With this perspective, the paper describes – in a way that does not intend to be exhaustive – some of the paratactic correlative structures used in contemporary Italian to express pre-concessives, a construction which imply an (at least potential) interplay between sender’s and some other people’s voices. In this kind of inter-clausal relation the content of the first coordinated element is something that in some way has already become part of the “universe of discourse”, something that is – or is at least presented as – thematic and co(n)textually given, whereas the following coordinated element, rhematic and co(n)textually new, contains the sender’s correction or objection: therefore, pre-concessives are inherently dialogical-polyphonic constructions, in which the sender takes up, even to correct them, the thought and voice of someone else.