La totalità come mezzo per la codifica dell’(inter)soggettività: il caso dell’italiano totale

ALBANESI, Lorenzo. La totalità come mezzo per la codifica dell’(inter)soggettività: il caso dell’italiano totale. In Seminari Informali, Dipartimento DIPSUM, Università degli Studi di Salerno. 2026.

Základní údaje

Originální název

La totalità come mezzo per la codifica dell’(inter)soggettività: il caso dell’italiano totale

Název anglicky

Totality as a means of encoding (inter)subjectivity: the case of the Italian 'totale'

Autoři

ALBANESI, Lorenzo ORCID

Vydání

Seminari Informali, Dipartimento DIPSUM, Università degli Studi di Salerno, 2026

---

Další údaje

Jazyk

italština

Typ výsledku

Vyžádané přednášky

Obor

60203 Linguistics

Stát vydavatele

Itálie

Utajení

není předmětem státního či obchodního tajemství

Označené pro přenos do RIV

Ne

Organizační jednotka

Filozofická fakulta

Klíčová slova anglicky

totality; (inter)subjectivity; agreement; spoken language

Štítky

intersubjectivity, Italian, pragmatics, semantics, Spoken Italian, spoken language, subjectivity, totality

Příznaky

Mezinárodní význam, Recenzováno

---

Anotace

Anglicky

When we communicate, we express content from a particular point of view, that is, with a certain degree of subjectivity: we index the speaker’s perspective or viewpoint, contributing to the subjective dimension of discourse (Athanasiadou 2007). However, the use of totality terms as a source of subjectivity has so far received relatively little attention (Paradis 2000; Wu 2015; Wu & Tao 2018). In particular, how such expressions structure subjective and intersubjective meaning (Traugott 2003, 2010; Visconti 2009) in spoken interaction remains poorly understood. This raises the question of how totality can be reinterpreted at the interactional level. This paper addresses this issue through a case study of the Italian adjective totale ‘total’, examining its semantic-pragmatic contribution across propositional and interactional uses. The analysis is based on spoken data from the KiParla corpus (Ballarè & Mauri 2020) and adopts a cognitive-functional framework (Langacker 1998; Paradis 2001; Croft & Cruse 2010, inter alii). The approach is qualitative and corpus-based, with occurrences annotated for semantic-pragmatic value of totale and the scoped element. In its referential uses, totale encodes quantitative totality, expressing exhaustive coverage over a domain. However, corpus evidence shows that, when conveying the speaker’s subjective stance toward a situation, totale takes scope over NPs that are semantically positioned along a continuum from denotative to connotative meaning. Here, it modifies domains that are not lexically bounded, combining preferentially with mass-like nouns and yielding maximal interpretations. Rather than shifting to scalarity, totale operates as a bound-imposing operator, introducing a maximal value. In this way, it effectively closes an otherwise open domain (Paradis 2000) and “boosts” (Caffi 2006) the intensity of the utterance. Crucially, totale has recently been used as a discourse marker of agreement, considering agreement as an umbrella term including diverse discursive functions, i.e. acknowledgment, alignment and approval (agreement stricto sensu) (Borreguero Zuloaga & Ferroni 2020). Data suggests that in spoken Italian, totale also functions as a turn-constructional unit indexing full agreement with the prior speaker (Auer 1984; Sacks 1987; Pomerantz 2021; Sansò 2020). We propose that totale systematically operates along a continuum ranging from objective to subjective to intersubjective meaning: across all domains, totale consistently encodes the elimination of residual alternatives. Yet, at the interactional level, this semantic configuration is reinterpreted as absence of dissent, yielding maximal agreement, whereby the speaker encodes their awareness of the addressee’s stance. While the present analysis is synchronic, the distribution of uses is consistent with a process of (inter)subjectification (Traugott 2010), whereby meanings come to increasingly encode speaker stance and orientation to the addressee. The paper argues that totale retains a unified core semantics – totality - while expanding its scope from the saturation of propositional content to subjectivity and, ultimately, to the management of agreement in interaction. Drawing on naturally occurring spoken interactions, the analysis suggests that expressions of totality are particularly prone to developing agreement functions, as their core semantics can be reinterpreted interactionally as absence of dissent, thus providing a compact resource for expressing maximal agreement in spoken discourse.