The semantic and pragmatic meanings of italian davvero through text types

It is generally maintained that, as a modal adverb, Italian davvero 'really' signals the degree of certainty attributed by the speaker to the modified linguistic material or expresses its positive evaluation (De Cesare, 2002a, b; Ricca & Visconti, 2014). Differently from other modal adverbs (e.g., probabilmente 'probably'), in its absolute use, davvero can react to an interlocutor's statement, reinforcing it or questioning it, thus expressing an epistemic judgment on an already existing assertion (De Cesare, 2003). We suggest that davvero retains this inherently dialogic feature in certain monologic texts, both spoken and written: in particular, we have considered a large corpus of Italian political monologues (the IMPAQTS corpus) and an ad hoc corpus of Italian tweets written by politicians and a large corpus of news reports (Repubblica). Our analysis shows that in these types of texts and in some specific linguistic configurations, davvero expresses a negative epistemic judgment and the overall polemic attitude of the speaker. Furthermore, davvero is able to trigger a presupposition of existence of a first voice responsible for an already shared content. On the contrary, in spontaneous spoken Italian (Kiparla corpus), the pragmatic functions performed by davvero seem quite different, being related not to persuasive functions, but to the expression of agreement, surprise and courtesy.