Chapter 7. Illocution as a unit of reference for spontaneous speech

Bossaglia, Giulia; Mello, Heliana; Raso, Tommaso

doi:10.1075/scl.94.07bos

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 57 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…We will briefly summarise Language into Act Theory, referencing literature that deals with this approach (Cresti & Moneglia 2005, 2018aBossaglia et al 2020). Within L-AcT, the primary reference unit for the analysis of speech has a pragmatic definition that is tied to a long tradition -that of the utterance -and corresponds to the accomplishment of an illocutionary act (Austin 1962).…”

Section: Language Into Act Theorymentioning

confidence: 99%

The Appendix of Comment according to Language into Act Theory

Cresti¹

2021

CHIMERA

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The article deals with the détachement instances, an aspect of spoken language differing from the binary structure (Topic-Comment) considered to both semantically and informationally form the basic unit of spoken language. According to Language into Act Theory, détachment instances are considered specific information units called Appendix of Comment (APC), with a clear distinction from the Topic unit. The APC may be formally identified in the corpus through its distribution after the Comment and its prosodic performance via a suffix unit. The APC records a frequency value of 4.28% of reference units, which is significantly lower than that of the Topic (close to 20%). The morpho-syntactic fillings of the APC show a kind of “randomness”, that cannot truly be generalized, unlike Topic, since they are employed “in the moment”, as late adjunctions, echoes, repetitions, deictics, and formulas. APC doesn’t constitute a syntactic/semantic island, as Topic does, and its content is ultimately irrelevant, lacks an independent modality and is de-focused. The APC’s features confirm the specificity of its information function in order to textually integrate with the Comment, facilitating an agreement with the addressee, while the Topic serves as the field of application for the illocutionary force. The purpose of the article is to explain the distinction between the previous information functions by demonstrating the specific role of Appendix through examples derived from Italian corpus analysis.

show abstract