Discourse Marker Dico in the 16th Century Italian Language

The article is devoted to the functional and semantic analysis of the form dico in the 16 th-century Italian language, the main aim being to show how it gradually begins to function as a discourse marker. The study is performed on the basis of texts belonging to different genres (mainly comedies and treatises in the dialogue form) where certain peculiarities of spoken language are imitated. We come to the conclusion that the invariant pragmatic meaning of this unit is "second attempt to establish successful communication". We also claim that the promotion of dico to the role of a discourse marker is the result of the secondary metaphorization of dire. We point out to the parallelism between the metaphoric uses of dire, namely, the epistemic one ("to say" = "to claim, to consider") and the volitional one ("to say" = "to order, to command"), on the one hand, and the use of dico in its two main functions, on the other hand. The functions in question are a) adducing a comment to the previous statement, and b) urging the addressee to act in a certain way. In both cases one can speak of a partial desemantization of dico and its metaphorization that allows it to function as a pragmatic signal rather than a regular verbal form. On the formal level it is manifested by the absence of complements, syntactic freedom of dico and its tendency to occupy a certain position within a sentence depending exclusively on its pragmatic (and not grammatical-syntactic) function.