Once known, always known. Turn-final SAI in North-East regional Italian

This paper focuses on the structural and functional properties of a positionally flexible verb-based discourse marker, SAI (lit. ‘you know’), which in its turn-final position is a conversational hallmark of the regional variety of Standard Italian spoken in and around Padova, in the north-eastern region of Veneto. Drawing from a series of distributional and scopal constraints (including the interaction with other turn-initial and turn-final verb-based discourse markers, vocative phrases, verum focus, and the negative polarity item mica), it is claimed that both turn-initial and turn-final SAI are best analyzed as intersubjectively-oriented Common Ground management operators (Repp, Sophie. 2013. Common ground management: Modal particles, illocutionary negation and verum. In Daniel Gutzmann & Hans-Martin Gärtner (eds.), Beyond expressives: explorations in use-conditional meaning (Current Research in the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface 28), 231–274. Leiden & Boston: Brill) activated by Spe...