La particella discorsiva guarda: aspetti pragmatici e sintattici

This paper discusses the pragmatic and syntactic properties of the Italian discourse marker guarda, with comparative observations with its equivalents in other Romance languages and in English. In addition to an overview of its discourse function(s), the syntactic analysis of guarda is provided, based on its distribution (initial, medial, final position), the type of sentence in which it may occur (declarative, interrogative, imperative), and its morphological form (inflected, uninflected). Two different particles guarda should be assumed, one occurring in sentence-initial and the other in sentence-internal position. Sentence–final guarda is subsumed under the latter case by syntactic derivation, i.e., the proposition moves to the left of guarda as it does with right-dislocated constituents. Crosslinguistic evidence suggests that discourse markers are sensitive to the sentence type on a par with modal particles, pace Waltereit and Detges (2007). Sentence-internal (including sentence-final) guarda is indeed sensitive to the type of sentence in which it occurs. It is also suggested that the pragmaticalisation of guarda from verb to discourse marker may be considered to be a synchronic process and not necessarily a diachronic process.