Interactions between distribution and functional uses in Italian adversative pragmatic markers

This chapter describes the interaction between distribution and functional uses of the Italian Adversative Pragmatic Markers (APMs) ma and però in spontaneous spoken language. These forms are claimed to be distributionally and functionally asymmetrical, as ma preferentially occurs in the left periphery, performing a turn-taking function, while only però can appear in the right periphery, with a cohesive function. Results from a semasiological (form-to-function), corpus-based and multi-level (prosodic, information and functional) investigation show that APM asymmetry is not clear-cut. Although the multi-level description supports Beeching and Detges’s (2014) function-periphery asymmetry hypothesis as a general tendency, it also argues in favor of a more fine-grained functional analysis.