Complex illocutive units in language into act theory: an analysis of non-terminal prosodic breaks of bound comments and lists

Abstract

This work presents a preliminary analysis for a prosodic description of two different spoken structures in spoken language within the theoretical framework of the Language into Act Theory (L-AcT): (i) chains of two or more Bound Comments (COB) that do not form a compositional informative and prosodic unit; (ii) compositional Information Units formed by two or more Multiple Comments (CMM) of the List type, linked together by a conventional prosodic model that implements a specific meta-illocutive structure . The goal of this study is to underline specific features of the COB units and the List-type CMM units, detecting prosodic properties of Italian and Brazilian Portuguese spoken language. Through a specific script for Praat software, different parameters are automatically calculated: f0 reset, slope and variation rate, pause duration, spectral emphasis. Our results highlighted a common prosodic behavior in COB-units in terms of f0 movement (rising in the stressed syllable before the break and falling in the unstressed one just before the break), and high similarity between the two COBs and Lists, but also the need to distinguish the effects connected to the position of the stress from the specific features of the unit as detectable Textual Unit.