Pragmatic functions and phonetic reduction: cioè and cè in contemporary spoken Italian

This paper investigates the phenomenon of phonetic reduction of the reformulation marker cioè, a very frequent lexical item in spoken Italian. This word has attracted both scholarly attention and popular interest over the years because of its multifunctionality and ability to convey a variety of social meanings. On top of this, the recent appearance of the reduced form cè has also been observed to have become increasingly frequent even in informal written usages. This contribution aims at exploring the validity of informal observations that have been made about the distribution of cè and cioè. This is achieved by providing an acoustic analysis of the occurrences of this lexical item within a corpus of conversational spoken Italian, as well as by relating the phonetically full and reduced forms of these items to the main functions they perform. The results of the analysis conducted in this paper confirm the prevalence of phonetically reduced types over full forms, as well as the functional specialization of the unreduced form, two facts which seem to support the thesis that an ongoing change in formal and functional terms is happening.