This article investigates the polyfunctionality of the Italian adverb pure ‘also’ and its relationship with post-modal meanings. Beside its prototypical use as an additive focus adverb, pure displays secondary uses which involve categories that fall within the post-modal domain, such as concessivity, speech act marking, and illocutionary modification. Drawing on newly extracted corpus data, this article shows (i) how the additive semantics of pure lends itself to cover different discourse-pragmatic functions, (ii) describes their features and the connections between them, and (iii) highlights patterns of semantic change. The results contribute to shed light on the internal structure of the post-modal domain and on the different development paths leading to it. Special attention has been given to illocutionary modification, both in terms of the range of functions which can be subsumed under this category and its position in a layered model of grammar.
