Abstract
This article deals with the topic of discourse markers and focus particles in the context of language contact. The perspective is comparative and partly diachronic: various languages and language varieties in contact with Italian are considered and, when possible, various stages of the same language are taken into account, too. A distribution of these loanwords displaying pragmatic and textual functions will be accounted for and tentatively explained. Finally, the relationship between these loanwords and the borrowing of coordinative and subordinative conjunctions will be considered and analyzed in a wider perspective of languages in contact and phenomena of language change.