La strategia di affermazione dell'italiano "appunto"

In this paper we shall be concentrating on Italian affirmation operator appunto. Our goal is to offer a description of the metalinguistic operation that it carries out. The study examines examples taken from two different research corpora: one corpus is made of Spanish translations of Italian novels ex- cerpts, and it will provide us with an insight on how translators have dealt with the difficulties that may arise when an Spanish speaking person faces appunto; the other corpus is composed of sponta- neous conversations of Italian speakers, and it will let us analyse how native speakers use appunto in interactive contexts. The examination of the affirmation microsystems in Spanish and Italian leads us to the hypothesis that the operation behind appunto does not correspond to any Spanish operator. This fact may also account for the problems appunto causes to Spanish speakers who learn Italian. Making use of the metaoperational grammar analysis tools, we conclude that appunto merely alludes to a precedent segment that is in no virtual competition with other segments, and therefore it does not trigger contextual novelty effects.