Is Italian Clitic Right Dislocation grammaticalised? A prosodic analysis of yes/no questions and statements

Abstract This paper analyses the intonation of Italian yes/no questions and statements containing a Clitic Right Dislocation (CLRD) to determine whether this construction shows evidence of grammaticalisation at the prosodic level. We examine 251 CLRDs taken from task-oriented dialogues, showing that the prosody of the CLRD is strongly affected by the modality of the utterance: whereas statements mostly have the main prominence on the verbal predicate, in yes/no questions, the main accent predominantly occurs on the post-verbal noun phrase. Therefore, in declaratives, the traces of prosodic grammaticalisation are relatively weak, whereas the opposite is true for questions. We also analysed the discourse status and the degree of accessibility of the relevant referent. We hypothesise that CLRDs with different modality are functionally differentiated at the discourse level. Whereas declaratives reinforce topic continuity through the repetition of an active topic, we claim that interrogatives encode a high degree of accessibility of the referent to the speaker together with the speakerʹs uncertainty about the accessibility of the same referent to the listener. We therefore argue that yes/no questions with a CLRD express a confirmation request. We also explore the relationship between the discourse-status of the relevant referent and the prominence pattern of the utterance.