Roads to exemplification in Italian: cognition and discourse

The aim of this work is to study a pool of exemplifying constructions in contemporary Italian. We will analyse non so, che (ne) so (I don't know, what do I know), ad/per esempio (for example), mettiamo, poniamo (let's suppose), magari (maybe), per dire (just to say), and tipo (like) used as exemplifying constructions introducing examples. These devices are sometimes employed to construct on-line contextually relevant categories (Barsalou 1983, Croft & Cruse 1994) or to moderate the speaker commitment to some speech acts, thus softening proposals, requests and advices (Goffman 1969). We will apply a corpus-based methodology to three corpora: Lip (spoken, 96 instances), Coris (written, 439 instances), and Nunc (written-spoken, 359 instances). Some functional and structural parameters will be employed to conduct the quantitative analysis from a semantic and pragmatic perspective: see for example, focus of the exemplification process (category or example), syntactic level of the category, occurrence of example in lists or individually, and mitigation functions. The work can be interesting because it displays that exemplification is not only a process of meaning clarification; we intend to show that exemplifying constructions are indeed cognitive strategies that require an abstraction over concrete exemplars in order to construct ad hoc categories (categorization function); additionally, these tools may mitigate the face-threatening potential of the speaker's personal believes, considerations, hypotheses and requests (attenuation and politeness). In conclusion, we will discuss frequencies of the functions and of the semantic and structural correlations. Particularly, we will study hypotheses about the link between exemplification and ad hoc categorization, epistemic modality, subjectivity, and vagueness; we will stress that exemplification is a general process that selects entities that are highly context-dependent to achieve contextual goals; consequently, we will analyze the communicative and the procedural implications of this statement