Analisi degli avverbi epistemici nei discorsi della Camera dei Deputati italiana

The main purpose of this work is to analyse the use of Italian epistemic adverbs certamente, sicuramente, ovviamente and evidentemente during the meetings of the Italian Chamber of Deputies. This study focuses primarily on two key issues: the relation between the syntactic position and the scope of epistemic adverbs, and the way in which they contribute to build argumentation. Epistemic adverbs express the speaker’s judgment about the certainty of a proposition, therefore they play an important role in handling agreement and disagreement and support or reject an opinion. Moreover, since they may occur in all positions in a sentence, it would be interesting to study if there is a link between syntactic position and scope of the adverb. The first aim of this study has been to find a specific context, in order to describe these adverbs in an accurate way. We chose parliamentarians’ speeches in the Chamber of Deputies for several reasons: political speeches are argumentative text-type, hence an appropriate field to build argumentation; every speech is transcribed in the stenographic report and published on the website of the Chamber of Deputies; almost all the speeches are a highly planned talk based on a written text. The analysis showed that the semantic effect of epistemic adverbs extends to the whole sentence, despite the syntactic position; nevertheless it is important to highlight that some examples containing the adverb evidentemente were ambiguous. On the other hand, the study also revealed that epistemic adverbs contribute to build argumentation and they occur in recurring propositional structures (in adversative and causal structures or with certain figures of speech like irony and rhetorical questions), where they may further emphasise disagreement or mitigate it.