Avverbiali di certezza in italiano antico. Funzioni preagmatico-discorsive e sintassi

Through the analysis of contexts yielded by the BIZ and Corpus OVI databases, the paper provides a detailed description of the syntactic behaviour of those adverbs, commonly defined as epistemic markers, that refer to the conceptual domain of “certainty”, i.e. certo, certamente, senza dubbio, sicuramente. The investigation of the two variants of scope and position in the sentence – front position, before or after the verb, and end position – indicates that, though they have not yet developed a fully epistemic function, these adverbs act as discourse markers. As such, they are capable of modifying the illocutionary force of speech acts within a communicative exchange.