Imperatives, interruption in conversation, and the rise of discourse markers:: a study of Italian guarda

This paper investigates the history of discourse markers, with special reference to Italian guarda. This discourse marker has arisen from the imperative guarda! 'look!'. The imperative 'look!' may entitle the speaker to an interruption, because it conversationally implicates that she has to say something extremely important that requires the immediate attention of the conversation partners. It is argued that speakers will tend to use this imperative even in situations where they do not have something important for the others to look at. They will do so simply because this imperative is so useful for floor-begging. At this point, guarda! is no longer an imperative, but a discourse marker. The variety of DM functions can be shown to be already present as side-effects of the imperative use. Furthermore it will be argued, contrary to most current work, that the genesis of discourse markers is not an instance of grammaticalization.