The question particle o in some Tuscan dialects: Fiorentino, Pisano and Crespinese

• Olga Kellert ^[1] ; Sebastian Lauschus
  1. [1] Göttingen Universität
• Localización: Italian journal of linguistics, ISSN 1120-2726, Vol. 28, Nº. 2, 2016, págs. 69-102
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • This study deals with the question particle 'o' in some Tuscan dialects. We will distinguish the question particle 'o' from homophone elements. It will be shown that the question particle 'o' should be treated as a distinct element from the vocative or interjection 'o(h)' and the disjunction 'o'. We will also look at its distribution in different sentence types. It will be shown that the particle 'o' cannot appear in declaratives and is restricted to certain sentence types, namely main clause interrogatives, imperatives and exclamatives (see also Garzonio 2004). Moreover, we will investigate the semantic and/or pragmatic contribution the particle adds to the question interpretation. What we would like to suggest is that the special question character arises from the epistemic implicature encoded by the particle 'o' (see Han & Romero 2004). We will argue that 'o' as a particle is a speech act marker which will be represented in a speech act phrase in line with Speas & Tenny (2003) (cf. also Benincà 2001, Coniglio & Zegrean 2010, Miyagawa 2012)