The paper sketches the Language into Act Theory and how it catches the difference between the Navy monologue and the Hearts dialogue. According to L-AcT, two types of reference units, both ending with a prosodic terminal break are identified: utterance matching with a single speech act and stanza… read more
The paper presents the definition of the TOPIC information unit within the Language into Act Theory (L-AcT) and the prosodic and informational criteria used for its recovery in spontaneous speech corpora: Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish and American English. The TOPIC develops the… read more
The paper briefly presents the Language into Act Theory (L-AcT) that relies on two primary assumptions: (a) the pragmatic basis of Information Structure (IS); (b) a strict correspondence between prosodic units and information units. The study of IS requires the identification of the proper… read more
Most high frequency verbs referring to Action in our ordinary communication are General; that is, they productively extend to different actions in their own meaning. Moreover, languages can categorize actions differently. Despite its importance the variations of these verbs is largely unknown, and… read more