The illocutionary basis of information structure. The Language into Act Theory (L-AcT)

The paper briefly presents the Language into Act Theory (L-AcT) that relies on two primary assumptions: (a) the pragmatic basis of Information Structure (IS); (b) a strict correspondence between prosodic units and information units. The study of IS requires the identification of the proper reference unit for speech, that according to L-AcT is the utterance. Utterance is defined as the counterpart of a speech act (Austin 1962), and is demarcated by prosody in the flow of speech. The paper demonstrates the pragmatic foundation of IS. The Comment information unit conveys the illocutionary force, automatically expressing the new information and is the core of IS. In addition to the Topic-Comment relation, other information units exist, corresponding to Textual and Dialogical Functions. Given that information units match in one-to-one way to prosodic units, the prosodic annotation grounds the identification of information units in the flow of speech. The paper demonstrates L-AcT’s assumptions through examples taken from spontaneous spoken corpora of Romance languages, English, and Chinese. L-AcT appears therefore viable for application in large, corpus-based, typological studies