Senza e la connessione anticircostanziale: tra variazione tipologica e usi discorsivi

The purpose of this work is to describe the connective function of 'senza', which encodes the absence of a relation, instead of its presence. After examining the privative function of 'senza' at the prepositional level, we will analyze its connective function as anticircumstantial: the two clauses connected by 'senza' are indeed linked by virtue of their not being a circumstance one for the other. After exploring the linguistic diversity attested in the expression of this function and discussing the most important trends, we will place the Italian construction within a broader typo-logical picture. The corpus-based analysis of 'senza' in spoken Italian will then allow us to describe more thoroughly the anticircumstantial semantics of the connective, revealing the central role of speakers’ expectations. The use of connective 'senza' indeed activates a frame of habituality, which in turn generates an expectation of circumstantiality between the two linked clauses. It will be argued that the denial of this circumstantiality by means of 'senza' leads to deny an expectation present in the context, giving rise to oppositive and counterexpectative readings.