AUTHOR=Cresti Emanuela , Moneglia Massimo 

TITLE=The role of prosody for the expression of illocutionary types. The prosodic system of questions in spoken Italian and French according to Language into Act Theory

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Communication

VOLUME=8

YEAR=2023

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/communication/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2023.1124513

DOI=10.3389/fcomm.2023.1124513

ISSN=2297-900X

ABSTRACT=<p>This article presents a corpus-based study of the correlations between prosodic contours and question speech acts in Italian and French from the perspective of the Language into Act Theory (L-AcT). A rich taxonomy of question illocutionary types is derived from two comparable corpora of informal speech taken from the C-ORAL-ROM collection and illustrated through prototypic examples. The number of questions in speech is evaluated as &lt;10% of utterances. Despite their syntactic and accentual differences, the two languages share comparable pragmatic values conveyed by defined prosodic variations. Total questions, which can be answered with <italic>yes</italic> or <italic>no</italic>, are expected with canonical <italic>rising</italic> contours. Still, a good percentage shows the so-called declarative prosody (26% in FR and 36% in IT). They have been supposed to be <italic>biased</italic> by presupposing <italic>the proposition's truth</italic> and considered <italic>Requests for confirmations</italic> instead of genuinely <italic>Seeking for information acts</italic>. But presupposition, depending on intentional states, is hard to be detected, and no clear linguistic correlation was found. The corpus-based study of the prosody/pragmatics relation allows a better understanding of the system. Total questions should be framed within the larger category of <italic>Directives aimed at the addressee's linguistic behavior</italic>, which does not foresee <italic>seeking information</italic> as the only goal. When the speaker makes a <italic>hypothesis</italic> on what he asks—that is not an actual presupposition—he performs a <italic>Request for confirmation</italic>. This is true in most Total questions, and prosody complies with the canonical contour. In contrast, declarative contours correlate with corpus contexts in which the speaker does not make any <italic>hypothesis</italic> but puts <italic>pressure</italic> on the addressee (<italic>Challenging Questions</italic>). <italic>Partial questions</italic> genuinely <italic>seek information</italic> and comprise <italic>Open questions</italic>, which are verbless utterances where the addressee is requested to freely provide information on a given topic. <italic>Tag questions, Double questions</italic>, and <italic>Alternative questions</italic> correspond to <italic>Illocutionary patterns</italic> that, according to L-AcT, are composed of two pragmatic units framed within one prosodic strategy.</p>