Chapter published in:
In Search of Basic Units of Spoken Language: A corpus-driven approach
Edited by Shlomo Izre'el, Heliana Mello, Alessandro Panunzi and Tommaso Raso
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 94] 2020
► pp. 181–219

The pragmatic analysis of speech and its illocutionary classification according to the Language into Act Theory

| University of Florence – LABLITA
According to the Language into Act Theory, reference units in speech have a pragmatic nature: they correspond to the activation of sensory-motor schemas leading to the performance of different speech acts. Our background is the affective and psychic motivations of the Human Birth Theory (Fagioli, 1971), compatible with recent theories of Embodied Cognition. Identification and classification of speech acts rest on corpus-based research. Speech activity is encoded by prosody, that conveys utterance boundaries, illocutionary force and information structure. The utterance nucleus is the Comment, responsible for illocutionary force. We illustrate the methodology for the induction of illocutions from corpora and detail pragmatic and prosodic features which allow classifying illocutionary types. A case study is presented for four original illocutions (self-conclusion, assertion taken for granted, ascertainment, evidentiality assertion).
Keywords: speech activity, illocutions, spoken corpora, prosody, information structure
Published online: 18 June 2020
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.94.06cre
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