The present study deals with the phonetic description of sentence topics in Italian tourist guides’ speech. We focus on syntactic features, phrase structure, function and weight, and pragmatic aspects, discourse role and givenness. Specifically, tonal events, i.e. accents and boundaries, phonetic phrasing, and disfluency phenomena were investigated. Results show that both syntactic and pragmatic factors play a role in the phonetic realization of topics, though they act at different levels. In particular, disfluencies are found to be affected by syntactic weight and givenness, while tonal events seem to depend mainly on the discourse role. Deaccented realizations are possible as well, but only for given topical entities.
Sentence topics in Italian: an analysis on the Chrome corpus
Alfano Iolanda
;Cataldo Violetta
;Orrico Riccardo
;Schettino Loredana
2021-01-01
Abstract
The present study deals with the phonetic description of sentence topics in Italian tourist guides’ speech. We focus on syntactic features, phrase structure, function and weight, and pragmatic aspects, discourse role and givenness. Specifically, tonal events, i.e. accents and boundaries, phonetic phrasing, and disfluency phenomena were investigated. Results show that both syntactic and pragmatic factors play a role in the phonetic realization of topics, though they act at different levels. In particular, disfluencies are found to be affected by syntactic weight and givenness, while tonal events seem to depend mainly on the discourse role. Deaccented realizations are possible as well, but only for given topical entities.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
