Disjunctive/conjunctive/whatever: the development of Italian barra (‘slash’) as a non-exhaustive connective

The paper investigates the use and functions of barra in Italian. Barra, the lexical realization of the punctuation mark < / >, has recently come to be used also in online settings and in everyday speech. In written, formal contexts, this punctuation mark is mainly used for the expression of alternatives (also with an adjunctive sense). In contemporary Italian, however, it is developing a new function as a non-exhaustive connective. After describing the incipient grammaticalization of barra, the morphology and semantics of the constructions with barra are discussed. The paper also shows the possible development of a grammatical element from the verbalization of a punctuation mark. This eventuality has become more frequent in the Internet era, where – by virtue of the diffusion of visualized language – not only features of colloquial speech get into written language, but also, and somewhat unexpectedly, vice versa. •The paper shows the incipient grammaticalization of barra as a non-exhaustive connective in contemporary colloquial Italian.•Constructions with barra are used as a strategy to convey complex and composite meanings, similar to contextualized binomials/polynomials.•Not only features of colloquial speech get into written language, but the opposite can also happen.