On the development of the Italian truth adverbs "davvero" and "veramente"

The article compares the meanings and uses of the two Italian adverbs “davvero” and “veramente” across the whole documented history of the language. The investigation is carried out by inspection of two large corpora, Opera del Vocabolario Italiano (OVI: Old Italian) and Letteratura Italiana Zanichelli (LIZ: literary Italian from 13th to 19th century), supplemented by oral data from corpora of contemporary spoken Italian. While both items display a wide and overlapping polysemy, which includes objective and subjective uses, since the beginning of their documentation, "veramente" alone develops a new mitigation function when occurring in a confutational context. This represents a further evolution from subjectification to intersubjectification, in the perspective of Traugott’s model, and arguably shows the relevance of interactional factors in semantic change, pointing in particular to the strong intersubjective potential of the turn-taking position, in which “veramente” occurs much more frequently than “davvero”.