Cover not available
Part of
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. 383–402

Chapter 7
Some notes on the Hearts and Navy excerpts according to the Language into Act Theory

| University of Florence – LABLITA
| University of Florence – LABLITA

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 expressing a flow of thought through an adjunction process. Navy is a sequence of two narrative stanzas with a complex informational organization, while Hearts is organized in 11 utterances showing high illocutionary variation. The core of the information pattern is the Comment accomplishing the illocutionary force. The information structure, expressing a closed set of functions, is in one-to-one correspondence with the prosodic structure. The linguistic content is not compositional across information units.

Keywords: reference units, illocutionary force, information structure, prosodic structure, compositionality
Article outline
  • 1.Premises
  • 2.The tagged transcription according to L-AcT
  • 3.The pragmatic analysis
  • 4.The organization of information
  • 5.L-AcT analysis beyond pragmatics
  • References
Published online: 18 June 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.94.16cre
References
Austin, J. L.
(1962) How to do things with words. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Chafe, W.
(1970) Meaning and the structure of language. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Cresti, E.
(2000) Corpus di italiano parlato. Firenze: Accademia della Crusca.Google Scholar
(2009) La Stanza: un'unità di costruzione testuale del parlato. In A. Ferrari (Ed.), Sintassi storica e sincronica dell’italiano. Subordinazione, coordinazione, giustapposizione. Atti del X Congresso della Società Internazionale di Linguistica e Filologia Italiana, vol 2 (pp. 713–732). Firenze: Firenze University Press.Google Scholar
(2014) Syntactic properties of spontaneous speech in the Language into Act Theory: Data on Italian complements and relative clauses. In T. Raso & H. Mello (Eds.), Spoken corpora and linguistics studies (pp. 365–410). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2017) The empirical foundation of illocutionary classification. In A. De Meo & F. Dovetto (Eds.), Atti SLI – GSCP international conference, la comunicazione parlata (pp. 243–264). Napoli: Aracne.Google Scholar
this volume). The pragmatic analysis of speech and its illocutionary classification according to Language into Act Theory. In S. Izre’el, H. Mello, A. Panunzi, & T. Raso Eds. In search of basic units of spoken language: A corpus-driven approach Amsterdam John Benjamins DOI logo
2019). Aspetti interpuntivi nella prosa letteraria. In A. Ferrari, L. Lala, F. Pecorari, & R. Stojmenova Weber Eds. Atti del convegno internazionale “Punteggiatura, sintassi, testualità nella varietà dei testi contemporanei” pp. 349 362 Firenze Cesati
Firenzuoli, V.
(2003) Le forme intonative di valore illocutivo dell’Italiano parlato: Analisi sperimentale di un corpus di parlato spontaneo (LABLITA) (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Università di Firenze, Italy.Google Scholar
’t Hart, J., Collier, R., & Cohen, A.
(1990) A perceptual study on intonation. An experimental approach to speech melody. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Izre’el, S.
(2005) Intonation units and the structure of spontaneous spoken language: A view from Hebrew. In C. Auran, R. Bernard, C. Chanet, A. Colass, A. Di Christo, C. Portes, A. Reynier, & M. Vion (Eds.), Proceedings of the IDP05 international symposium on discourse-prosody interfaces. Aix-en-Provence: Université de Provence.Google Scholar
Moneglia, M., & Cresti, E.
(2006) C-ORAL-ROM prosodic boundaries for spontaneous speech analysis. In Y. Kawaguchi, S. Zaima, & T. Takagaki (Eds.), Spoken language corpus and linguistics informatics (pp. 89–114). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Moneglia, M., & Raso, T.
(2014) Notes on the Language into Act Theory. In T. Raso & H. Mello (Eds.), Spoken corpora and linguistics studies (pp. 468–494). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Panunzi, A., & Gregori, L.
(2011) DB-IPIC. AN XML database for the representation of information structure in spoken language. In H. Mello, A. Panunzi, & T. Raso (Eds.), Pragmatics and prosody. illocution, modality, attitude, information patterning and speech annotation (pp. 133–150). Firenze: Firenze University Press.Google Scholar
Panunzi, A., & Mittmann, M.
(2014) The IPIC resource and a cross-linguistic analysis of information structure in Italian and Brazilian Portuguese. In T. Raso & H. Mello (Eds.), Spoken corpora and linguistic studies (pp. 129–151). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Panunzi, A., & Saccone, V.
(2018) Complex illocutive units in L-AcT: An analysis of non-terminal prosodic breaks of bound and multiple comments. Revista de Estudos da Linguagem, 26 (4), 1647–1674. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Raso, T.
(2014) Prosodic constraints for discourse markers. In T. Raso & H. Mello (Eds.), Spoken corpora and linguistic studies (pp. 411–467). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Searle, J. R.
(1969) Speech acts: An essay in the philosophy of language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar