27.1208, Diss: Italian, Spanish, Phonetics, Pragmatics: Iolanda Alfano: 'The interface between pragmatics and prosody in Spanish and Italian: requests in task-oriented dialogues'

[The LINGUIST List via LINGUIST]

LINGUIST List: Vol-27-1208. Tue Mar 08 2016. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 27.1208, Diss: Italian, Spanish, Phonetics, Pragmatics: Iolanda Alfano: 'The interface between pragmatics and prosody in Spanish and Italian: requests in task-oriented dialogues'

Moderators: linguist at linguistlist.org (Damir Cavar, Malgorzata E. Cavar)
Reviews: reviews at linguistlist.org (Anthony Aristar, Helen Aristar-Dry, Sara Couture)
Homepage: http://linguistlist.org

*****************    LINGUIST List Support    *****************
                   25 years of LINGUIST List!
Please support the LL editors and operation with a donation at:
           http://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/

Editor for this issue: Ashley Parker <ashley at linguistlist.org>
================================================================


Date: Tue, 08 Mar 2016 14:35:42
From: Iolanda Alfano [iolandaalfano at libero.it]
Subject: The interface between pragmatics and prosody in Spanish and Italian: requests in task-oriented dialogues

 
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(s):
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.




------------------------------------------------------------------------------

*****************    LINGUIST List Support    *****************
Please support the LL editors and operation with a donation at:
            http://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/
 


----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-27-1208	
----------------------------------------------------------