LINGUIST List 27.1208
Tue Mar 08 2016
Diss: Italian, Spanish, Phonetics, Pragmatics: Iolanda Alfano: 'The interface between pragmatics and prosody in Spanish and Italian: requests in task-oriented dialogues'
Editor for this issue: Ashley Parker <ashleylinguistlist.org>
Date: 08-Mar-2016
From: Iolanda Alfano <iolandaalfano
libero.it>
Subject: The interface between pragmatics and prosody in Spanish and Italian: requests in task-oriented dialogues
E-mail this message to a friend Institution: Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Program: Department of Spanish Philology
Dissertation Status: Completed
Degree Date: 2015
Author: Iolanda Alfano
Dissertation Title: The interface between pragmatics and prosody in Spanish and Italian: requests in task-oriented dialogues
Linguistic Field(s): Phonetics
Pragmatics
Subject Language(s):
Italian (ita) Spanish (spa) Dissertation Director:
Renata Savy
Joaquim Llisterri
Dissertation Abstract:
This dissertation investigates some aspects of the interface between pragmatics and prosody and it aims to determine the role played by intonation in expressing communicative functions. For this purpose, among the different speech acts, this study explores some pragmatic and prosodic aspects of requests in task-oriented dialogues.
The corpus is composed of Neapolitan Italian dialogues and Spanish dialogues (in the variety spoken in Barcelona) and we examined it intra and interlinguistically, in order to contribute to theoretical and methodological developments of the field of teaching Italian and Spanish as foreign languages.
In both linguistic levels –pragmatic and prosodic–, results do reveal interesting differences between the two languages.
Pragmatic analysis indicates that the same kinds of requests occur with a different frequency and distribution and that they have different functional values as far as discourse topic introduction and management are concerned.
Prosodic analysis –consisting in a phonetic description of tonal contours of the requests– pays special attention to if and how information structure and morfo-syntax correlate with intonation. Results suggest that information structure and prosodic realizations do interact in so far as pragmatic functions of topic and comment systematically show specific melodic patterns. On the contrary, our analysis does not reveal a direct connection between morfo-syntactic structures and melodic patterns of request, either in Italian or in Spanish.
Interlinguistic comparison shows that some kinds of requests present a different intonation in Italian and Spanish, with relevant implications on teaching Italian to Spanish-speaking learners and, vice versa, on teaching Spanish to Italian-speaking learners.
Considering our results in the interface between pragmatics and prosody, we can conclude that intonation plays a crucial role in the construction of the functional systems of requests: each request shows its intonation pattern. Nevertheless, functional contribution of intonation varies and it seems to depend on the interaction with various kinds of linguistic and extralinguistic factors, strongly related to the real context of utterance.
Our findings provide empirical evidence which shows that even if it presents various theoretical and methodological problems, the study of linguistic interfaces is very useful and it allows a deeper and a better description compared to the separated analysis of the same linguistic levels.
Page Updated: 08-Mar-2016