Bag body Cross Women Silver Bag Editha Mini Drawstring Glitter 63 Bag Satchel Holographic Sling pBWIWxwXqn

This chapter analyses the evolution of Italian cioè lit. ‘that is’ in recent diachrony. Cioè developed a social indexicality as in the 1980s it was associated with a young speech style. Through a corpus-based analysis of listeners’ phone-ins to a radio station, this study analyses the functions of cioè in the speech styles of different age-cohorts and its diachronic evolution over the last thirty years. The evolution of cioè shows that speakers employ it creatively, through a progressive bleaching of its original semantic and pragmatic values. The expansion of its functions and contexts of occurrence is so extensive that the expression became stigmatized as a ‘verbal tic’ characteristic of the language spoken by an age-cohort of speakers. These same social values are at the origin of the progressive decline of cioè in new generations of young speakers and in the community as a whole.