“Off-the-shelf” features and pragmatic trajectories: The years of cioè in Italian

Linguistic variants have a ‘social’ value if alternants are “easily parsed, extracted, and recombined-taken off the shelf” (Eckert, 2019: 755). In this process indexicality is central as it connects (linguistic) signs to social occasions, anchoring language use into social patterns. Discourse markers, central elements within pragmatics, display formal and functional properties which make them ideal for identity construction and negotiation of social meaning. This contribution considers how social meaning aligns with the prototypically pragmatic meaning of discourse markers through the exemplar development of Italian cioè ‘that is’ from 1976 to today. Basing the analysis on spoken corpora and questionnaires on speakers' attitudes, the study shows that the social meaning of cioè is anchored in linguistic practices of social groups, which entail uses in different structural contexts, positions, and with different scopes. It also links the pragmatic development of cioè to the evolution of its social indexicalities. Lastly, it discusses the role of discourse markers, and of pragmatic variables, in the development of social personae and in the relationship of social meaning with indexicality. If the latter is the use of linguistic correlations to do social work, the former is its outcome in particular instances. • Discourse marker properties are ideal for identity construction and negotiation of social meaning. • Social meaning and pragmatic meaning develop together in the trajectory of the Italian discourse marker cioè ‘that is’. • Indexicality is central in pragmatic meaning, anchoring language use into social pattern. • Indexicality is the use of linguistic means to do social work. • Social meaning is a kind of pragmatic meaning, arising by inference on the social characteristics of someone.