Constellation of indexicalities and social meaning: cioè in Present-Day Italian
2018
This chapter analyses the evolution of Italian cioe lit. ‘that is’ in recent diachrony.
Cioe developed a social indexicality as in the 1980s it was associated with a
young speech style. Through a corpus-based analysis of listeners’ phone-ins
to a radio station, this study analyses the functions of cioe in the speech styles
of different age-cohorts and its diachronic evolution over the last thirty years.
The evolution of cioe shows that speakers employ it creatively, through a progressive
bleaching of its original semantic and pragmatic values. The expansion
of its functions and contexts of occurrence is so extensive that the expression
became stigmatized as a ‘verbal tic’ characteristic of the language spoken by an
age-cohort of speakers. These same social values are at the origin of the progressive
decline of cioe in new generations of young speakers and in the community
as a whole.
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