Cover not available
Part of
Spoken Corpora and Linguistic Studies
Edited by Tommaso Raso and Heliana Mello
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 61] 2014
► pp. 365–410

Syntactic properties of spontaneous speech in the Language into Act Theory

Data on Italian complements and relative clauses

ORCID logo

In comparison with writing the performance of spontaneous speech is characterized by a strong reduction of the syntax , anyway a clear and general representation of speech syntax does not emerge with evidence from literature. Our framework , the theory of Language into Act (L-AcT), which is an extension of the Speech act theory (Austin, 1962), it is derived from corpus-based research carried out on large spontaneous speech corpora. Utterance is assumed as the reference unit; it is pragmatically defined such as corresponding to a speech act and is identified through prosodic devices. In the L-AcT perspective, the syntactic reduction can start finding its explication in favor of pragmatic information functionality, because the final linguistic nature of the utterance corresponds to the combination of semantic/syntactic islands, going hand by hand with the information units (IU), taking part to its Information Pattern (IP), and being characterized each for a pragmatic function. Therefore also the study of syntax is carried out considering the information performance of the utterance. First of all the most common syntactic structures, in reality occurring in speech, are expounded in a general survey, with data resulting from corpus-based research. But the central topic of the paper is the explication of the two different types of subordination (linearized and patternized): actually both types of completive clauses (objective, subjective, indirect interrogative but also reported speech, spoken thought and exemplification) and types of relative clauses (restrictive and non-restrictive) are analyzed according to the feature to be performed in a linearized way within a same IU, or in a patternized way across two IUs. The deriving syntactic and semantic implications are commented. Finally, on the base of the IPIC-DB, general quantitative data regarding all kinds of completive and relative clauses are presented , making emerge their low frequency.

Published online: 14 November 2014
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.61.13cre
References
Acciardi, Daniela
2010 Funzioni connettivali nella lingua italiana scritta e parlata. Analisi corpus-based del connettivo perché. PhD dissertation, University of Florence.Google Scholar
Austin, John Langshaw
1962 How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Bally, Charles
1950 Linguistique générale et linguistique française. Bern: Francke Verlag.Google Scholar
Banfield, Ann
1982 Unspeakable Sentences. Narration and Representation in the Language of Fiction. Boston MA: Routledge & Kegan.Google Scholar
Barwise, Kenneth John & Perry, John
1983 Situations and Attitudes. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Biber, Douglas, Johansson, Stig, Leech, Geoffrey, Conrad, Susan & Finegan, Edward
1999 The Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Blanche-Benveniste, Claire
2010  Le Français . Usage de la langue parlée. Leuven: Peeters.Google Scholar
Blanche-Benveniste, Claire & Willems, Dominique
2007 Un nouveau regard sur les verbs faibles. Bullettin de la Societé Linguistique de Paris CII(1): 217–254.
Bybee, Joan & Fleischmann, Suzanne
1995 Modality and Grammar in Discourse [Typological Studies in Language 32]. Amsterdam: Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chafe, Wallace L
1970 Meaning and the Structure of Language. Chicago IL: the University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
1988 Linking intonation units in spoken English. In Clause Combining in Grammar and Discourse [Typological Studies in Language 18], John Haiman & Sandra Thompson (eds), 1–27. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Colombo, Adriano
2012 La coordinazione. Roma: Carocci.Google Scholar
Cresti, Emanuela
2000 Corpus di Italiano Parlato. Firenze: Accademia della Crusca.Google Scholar
2002 Illocuzione e modalità. In La parola al testo. Scritti per Bice Mortara-Garavelli, Gian L. Beccaria & Carla Marello (eds), 133–145.Alessandria: Dell’Orso.Google Scholar
2005a Notes on lexical strategy, structural strategies and surface clause indexes in the C-ORAL-ROM spoken corpora. In C-ORAL-ROM. Integrated Reference Corpora for Spoken Romance Languages [Studies in Corpus Linguistics 15], Emanuela Cresti & Massimo Moneglia (eds), 209–256. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2005b Enunciato e frase: Teoria e verifiche empiriche. In Italia linguistica: discorsi di scritto e di parlato. Nuovi studi di linguistica italiana per Giovanni Nencioni, Marco Biffi, Omar Calabrese & Luciana Salibra (eds), 249–260. Siena: Protagon Editori.Google Scholar
2009 Clitics and anaphoric relations in informational patterning: A corpus driven research in spontaneous spoken italian (C-ORAL-ROM). In Information Structures and its Interfaces, Lunella Mereu (ed.), 171–203. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2012 L’unité de suffixe: Identification et interprétation des unités de la langue parlé. In Penser les langues avec Claire Blanche-Benveniste, Sandrine Caddéo, Marie-Noëlle Roubaud, Magali Rouquier & Frédéric Sabio (eds), 201–213. Aix-en-Provence: Presses Universitaires de Provence.Google Scholar
2012a The definition of Focus in the framework of the Language into Act Theory. In Pragmatics and Prosody. Illocution, Modality, Attitude, Information Patterning and Speech Annotation, Alessandro Panunzi, Tommaso Raso & Heliana Mello (eds), 39–82. Florence: Firenze University Press.Google Scholar
Cresti, Emanuela & Firenzuoli, Valentina
1999 Illocution et profils intonatifs de l’italien. Revue Française de Linguistique Appliquée IV(2): 77–98.Google Scholar
Cresti, Emanuela & Moneglia, Massimo
(eds) 2005 C-ORAL-ROM. Integrated Reference Corpora for Spoken Romance Languages [Studies in Corpus Linguistics 15]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2010. Informational Patterning Theory and the Corpus based description of Spoken language. The compositionality issue in the Topic Comment pattern. In Bootstrapping Information from Corpora in a Cross Linguistic Perspective, Massimo Moneglia & Alessandro Panunzi (eds), 13–46. Florence: Firenze University Press.Google Scholar
Cresti, Emanuela, Moneglia, Massimo & Tucci, Ida
2011 Annotation de ‘Anita Musso’ selon la Théorie de langue en acte. In Unités syntaxiques et Unités prosodiques ,Florent Lefeuvre & Estelle Moline (eds). Langue Française 170: 95–110.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Davidson, Richard, Scherer, Klaus & Goldsmith, Hill
(eds) 2003 Handbook of Affective Sciences. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Evans, Nicholas
2007 Insubordination and its uses. In Finiteness, Irina Nikolaeva (ed.), 366–431. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Facchinetti, Roberta, Krug, Manfred & Palmer, Frank
2003 Modality in Contempary English. Berlin: Mouton-De Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fauconnier, Gilles
1984 Espaces mentaux. Paris: Leséditions de Minuit.Google Scholar
Firenzuoli, Valentina
2003 Le Forme Intonative di Valore Illocutivo dell’Italiano Parlato: Analisi Sperimentale di un Corpus di Parlato Spontaneo (LABLITA). PhD dissertation, University of Florence.Google Scholar
Giani, Daniela
2005 Il discorso riportato nell’italiano parlato e letterario: Confronto tra due corpora. PhD dissertation, University of Florence.Google Scholar
Haiman, John & Thompson, Sandra A
(eds) 1988 Clause Combining in Grammar and Discourse [Typological Studies in Language 18]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins DOI logoGoogle Scholar
‘t Hart, Johan, Collier, René & Cohen, Antoine
1990 A Perceptual Study on Intonation. An Experimental Approach to Speech Melody. Cambridge: CUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
LABLITA
[URL]
Martin, Philippe
2009 Intonation du Français. Paris:Armand Colin.Google Scholar
MacWhinney, Brian
2000 The CHILDES Project: Tools for Analyzing Talk. Mahwah NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Mello, Heliana & Ávila, Luciana
2013 Challenges in modality annotation in a Brazilian Portuguese Spontaneous Speech Corpus. In Proceedings of the X International Conference on Computational Semantics , 1–6. [URL]
Mello, Heliana & Raso, Tommaso
2012 Illocution, modality, attitude: Different names for different categories. In Pragmatics and Prosody. Illocution, Modality, Attitude, Information Patterning and Speech Annotation, Alessandro Panunzi, Tommaso Raso & Heliana Mello (eds), 1–18. Florence: Firenze University PressGoogle Scholar
Miller, Jim & Weinert, Regina
1998 Spontaneous Spoken Language. Syntax and Discourse. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Mittmann, Maryualê
2012 O C-ORAL-BRASIL e o estudo da fala informal: um novo olhar sobre o Tópico no Português Brasileiro. PhD Dissertation. Belo Horizonte: Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais.Google Scholar
Mithun, Marianne
2008 The extension of dependency beyond the sentence. Language 84: 69–119. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Moeschler, Jacques
1986 Connecteurs pragmatiques, lois de discours et stratégies interpretatives: Parce que et la justification énonciative. Cahiers de Linguistique Française 7:149–167.Google Scholar
Moneglia, Massimo
2006 Units of analysis of spontaneous speech and speech variation in a cross-linguistic perspective. In Spoken Language Corpus and Linguistics Informatics [Usage-Based Informatics 5], Yuji Kawaguchi, Susumu, Zaima, Toshihiro, Takagaki (eds), 153–179. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2011 Spoken corpora and pragmatics. Revista Brasileira de Linguìstica Aplìcada 11(2): 479–519.Google Scholar
Moneglia, Massimo & Cresti, Emanuela
1997 L’intonazione e i criteri di trascrizione del parlato adulto e infantile. In Il progetto CHILDES: strumenti per l’analisi del linguaggio parlato, vol II°, Umberta Bortolini & Elena Pizzuto (eds), 57–90. Pisa: Edizioni del Cerro.Google Scholar
Moraes, João
2012 From a prosodic point of view: Remarks on attitudinal meaning. In Pragmatics and Prosody. Illocution, Modality, Attitude, Information Patterning and Speech Annotation, Alessandro Panunzi, Tommaso Raso & Heliana Mello (eds), 19–38. Florence: Firenze University Press.Google Scholar
Palmer, Frank Robert
1986, Mood and Modality. Cambridge: CUP.Google Scholar
Panunzi, Alessandro
2009 Strutture scisse e pseudoscisse: Valori d’uso del verbo essere e articolazione dell’informazione nell’italiano parlato. In Sintassi storica e sincronica dell’italiano. Subordinazione, coordinazione, giustapposizione [Atti del X Congresso Internazionale della Società di Linguistica e Filologia Italiana], Angela Ferrari (ed.), 1121–1137. Firenze: Cesati.Google Scholar
2010 La variazione semantica del verbo essere nell’italiano parlato. Florence: Firenze University Press.Google Scholar
2011. Scisse, frasi. In Enciclopedia dell’italiano, Vol II, Raffaele Simone (ed.), 1284–1287. Roma: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana.Google Scholar
Panunzi, Alessandro & Gregori, Lorenzo
2012 DB-IPIC. An XML database for the representation of information structure in spoken language. In Pragmatics and Prosody. Illocution, Modality, Attitude, Information Patterning and Speech Annotation, Alessandro Panunzi, Tommaso Raso & Heliana Mello (eds), 133–150. Florence: Firenze University Press.Google Scholar
Raso, Tommaso & Mello, Heliana
2012 C-ORAL-BRASIL I: Corpus de referência de português brasileiro falado informal. Belo Horizonte: Editora UFMG.Google Scholar
Scarano, Antonietta
2002 Frasi relative e pseudo-relative in italiano: Sintassi, semantica e articolazione dell’informazione. Roma: Bulzoni.Google Scholar
2003 Les constructions de syntaxe segmentée: Syntaxe, macro-syntaxe et articulation de l’information. In Macrosyntaxe et pragmatique: L’analyse linguistique de l’oral, Antonietta Scarano (ed.), 183–203. Roma: Bulzoni.Google Scholar
2009 The prosodic annotation of C-ORAL-ROM and the structure of information in spoken language. In Information Structures and its Interfaces, Lunella Mereu (ed.), 51–74. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Scarano, Antonietta & Giani, Daniela
2003 L’italiano di oggi. Costrutti dislocati, scissi, aggettivali e discorso diretto riportato nelle varietà scritta e parlata. In L’Italia linguistica: Anno mille-anno duemila. Atti del XXXIV SLI, Nicoletta Maraschio (ed.), 536–581. Roma: Bulzoni.Google Scholar
Schegloff, Emanuel
2007 Sequence Organization in Interaction. A Primer in Conversation Analysis. Cambridge: CUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Scherer, Klaus
1986 Vocal affect expression: A review and a model for future research. Psychological Bulletin 99: 143–165. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Talmy, Leonard
1975 Figure and ground in complex sentences. In Proceedings of the I Annual meeting of the Berkeley Linguistic Society , 625–649. Berkeley CA: BLS.Google Scholar
Tucci, Ida
2007 La modalizzazione lessicale nel parlato spontaneo. Dati dal corpus C-ORALROM Italiano. PhD dissertation, University of Florence.Google Scholar
2009 The scope of lexical modality and the informational structure in spoken Italian. In Information Structures and its Interfaces, Lunella Mereu (ed.), 203–226. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2010 “Obiter dictum”. La funzione informativa delle unità parentetiche. In La Comunicazione parlata3. Atti del GSCP, Massimo Pettorino, Antolella Giannini & Francesca M. Dovetto (eds), 635–654. Napoli: Università l’Orientale Press.Google Scholar
Verstraete, Jean Chistophe
2007 Rethinking the Coordinate-subordinate Dichotomy: Interpersonal Grammar and the Analysis of Adverbial Clauses in English. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Verstraete, Jean Chistophe, D’Hertefelt, Sarah & Van Linden, An
2012 A typology of complement isubordination in Dutch. Studies in Language 36(1): 123–153. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
WINPITCH-PRO
[URL]

audio

Cited by

Cited by 7 other publications

Bossaglia, Giulia, Heliana Mello & Tommaso Raso
2020. Chapter 7. Illocution as a unit of reference for spontaneous speech. In In Search of Basic Units of Spoken Language [Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 94], ► pp. 221 ff. DOI logo
Cavalcante, Frederico Amorim, Tommaso Raso, Giulia Bossaglia, Maryualê Mittmann & Bruno Rocha
2020. Topic unit detection in spontaneous speech. CHIMERA: Revista de Corpus de Lenguas Romances y Estudios Lingüísticos 7 ► pp. 69 ff. DOI logo
Cresti, Emanuela
2020. Ancora sulla paratassi dello scritto letterario. CHIMERA: Revista de Corpus de Lenguas Romances y Estudios Lingüísticos 7 ► pp. 23 ff. DOI logo
Cresti, Emanuela & Massimo Moneglia
2018. The definition of the TOPIC within Language into Act Theory and its identification in spontaneous speech corpora. Revue Romane. Langue et littérature. International Journal of Romance Languages and Literatures 53:1 ► pp. 30 ff. DOI logo
2020. Chapter 7. Some notes on the Hearts and Navy excerpts according to the Language into Act Theory. In In Search of Basic Units of Spoken Language [Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 94], ► pp. 383 ff. DOI logo
Moneglia, Massimo
2022. Le unità di informazione Parentetiche alla periferia destra del Comment nella Teoria della Lingua in Atto. DILEF. Rivista digitale del Dipartimento di Lettere e Filosofia :1 ► pp. 88 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2018. How to Do Corpus Pragmatics on Pragmatically Annotated Data [Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 84], DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 12 march 2023. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.