Italian Sì / No in Replies Between Polarity and Agreement: A First Inquiry on Corpus Data

When referring to the distinction between polarity and agreement particles (cf. Moravsik, 1971; Pope, 1973), Italian sí / no can be described as polarity particles (cf. Bernini, 1995), as is the case for corresponding particles in other Romance languages. Indeed, speakers of Romance languages use them in similar ways in replies to positive utterances, where the positive particle also encodes agreement, and the negative particle also encodes disagreement. Instead, Romance languages cope in different ways with the conflicting case of replies to negative utterances (e.g. “Didn’t you read this book?”), where replies would encode either disagreement and assertion of a positive content (“That’s not true, I read it”) or agreement and assertion of a negative content (“You’re right, I didn’t”). Replies to negative utterances are therefore a crucial context for a deeper understanding of such particles (cf. Bernini, 1990 and 1995 for similar suggestions). Contrary to other Romance languages, such as French, Romanian or Portuguese, not much attention has been paid so far to this issue in Italian. The current study investigates the use of sí/no in replies to negative utterances, in two sets of elicited data: interviews and Map Tasks. The analysis has compared the use of particles in confirming and reversing replies, as well as in replies to assertions and to questions. The results show that the use of no (but not of sì) according to the (dis)agreement axis is documented, especially when conversationally marked moves are at play: in reversing (vs. confirming) replies and in replies to assertions (vs. replies to questions). Such an asymmetry is in line with cross-linguistic tendencies already observed in other (Romance and non-Romance) languages (cf. Bernini, 1990; Farkas & Bruce, 2010).