Sintassi, punteggiatura e interpretazione dei connettivi. Il caso di dunque e di tuttavia

The paper deals with the use of the connectives dunque and tuttavia in present-day Italian newspapers and non-fiction writing. Our analysis starts from the observation that dunque and tuttavia have a free syntactic distribution and can always be accompanied by a comma. We aim at evaluating, through a corpus-based methodology, how and how much the syntactic distribution and the punctuation accompanying dunque and tuttavia affect the meaning of the connectives, and in particular the discourse relation they convey (consecution and reformulation in the case of dunque, direct and indirect concession in the case of tuttavia). The analysis also offers some quantitative data (mostly unexpected) on the distributional tendencies and on the actual combinations with punctuation of the two connectives.