The interplay between illocutionary force and information managing: On the pragmatic functions of Italian UN PO' ‘a bit’ and European Portuguese LÁ ‘there’

This paper investigates the polyfunctionality of two Romance adverbial elements: Italian un po’ ‘a bit’ and European Portuguese lá ‘there’. Both adverbs display various uses: some of them have a bearing on the propositional level of the sentence in which they appear, while others have a bearing on the management of the information conveyed by the utterance, or on the performance of speech acts. By describing the different contexts of occurrence of the adverbs, their meaning variation is examined, and a functional categorization is laid out. By building upon the layered model of grammatical categories proposed by Functional Discourse Grammar, the distinction between uses that relate to illocutionary force modification and uses that relate to information managing is analyzed in detail, and the interplay between these pragmatic functions is discussed.