Epistemic constructions at work. A corpus study on spoken Italian dialogues

This article describes a theoretical framework for modelling the epistemic constructions occurring in Italian spoken dialogues. Having assessed the traditional notion of commitment used in the literature on epistemicity on spoken data, we propose to revisit it within the framework of a dynamic, interactional, communitarian semantics. Having refined the functional definition of the domain, we single out, through a corpus-driven methodology, the functional and formal properties that characterize epistemic constructions. On this ground, we define an annotation scheme for epistemicity. We apply such a scheme to a large sample of Italian dialogic spoken data. Based on the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the annotated corpus, we start to sketch out a new grammar of Italian dialogic epistemic constructions.