Non-exhaustive lists in spoken language: A construction grammatical perspective

The aim of this paper is to analyze how speakers refer to non-exhaustive sets in spoken discourse, by means of open lists. We will propose an analysis of non-exhaustivity in terms of indexicality and we will therefore consider open lists as having an inherently pragmatic component. Based on corpus data of spoken Italian, we will identify three main types of non-exhaustive lists, showing different structural properties and non-compositional semantics. In order to account for the observed variation, we will take a construction grammatical perspective, arguing that what may appear as a heterogeneous set of strategies is instead an inheritance-based network of constructions sharing a schematic core (cf. Goldberg 1995). We will elaborate on the most recent approaches to list constructions, along the lines proposed by Masini, Mauri, & Pietrandrea (2018), and will identify three types of non-exhaustive list constructions, which inherit the core properties from the upper-level list construction, but at the same time show more specific features and constraints.