Strategie pragmatiche di introduzione di un Topic Discorsivo in dialoghi task-oriented: lingue a confronto

The purpose of this study is to analyse qualitatively and quantitatively how speakers of different languages introduce new Discourse Topics in dialogical speech. For the qualitative analysis, we present some functional-pragmatic continua as reliable means of accountingfor the dynamics of communicative strategies. With respect to the quantitative analysis, we examine the percentage of occurrences of pragmatic moves used to introduce a Discourse Topic. The study examines a multilingual corpus of task-oriented dialogues in Italian, Spanish, German and English. The analysis of Discourse Topics introduction allows to identify in-teresting textual characteristics. Speakers of all languages prefer moves which are oriented to successful task completion, without being impolite or aggressive. However, in each language speakers choose a different pragmatic pattern to signal attention to the interlocutor.