Italian davvero (‘really’) as a trigger of implicit contents in persuasive discourse

It is generally maintained that, as a modal adverb, Italian davvero ‘really’ signals a high degree of certainty attributed by the speaker to the modified linguistic material, or expresses a positive evaluation. Differently from other modal adverbs, in its absolute use, davvero can react to an interlocutor’s statement, reinforcing it or questioning it, thus expressing a judgement on an already existing assertion. In political monologues, we observe that the existence of an “interlocutor’s voice” responsible for an asserted content can be presupposed, with davvero being the trigger of such presupposition. In such cases, a second implicit content (a conversational implicature) is also generally conveyed which expresses the epistemic judgement of the speaker. We observe that this happens typically in some specific discourse configurations (i.e., questions and conditional subordinates) and we label this pragmatic enrichment ‘polemic polyphonic judgement’. We also show the manipulative potential of this pragmatic phenomenon. We finally suggest that davvero can trigger a conversational implicature also in other linguistic configurations, and we propose that context, and more specifically the stretch of text in which the adverb occurs, whether argumentative or non-argumentative, plays a crucial role in this pragmatic process.