Il ruolo di tempo, aspettualità e modalità negli equivalenti funzionali italiani del tedesco schon

This paper addresses the question of how the highly abstract and multifunctional German particle schon can be grasped and translated into Italian. Building upon previous research, an account of the semantics of schon is proposed and put into relation with the functional equivalents detected in parallel corpora. The core idea of the contribution is that Italian expresses the complex modality conveyed by schon through modal means such as adverbs and modal particles but also through temporal and aspectual means or an intensification strategy (repetition). This second type of (non-modal) means does not encode modality but rather the actuality of a process which implies its epistemic validity.