Complex Illocutive Units in L-AcT: An Analysis of Non-Terminal Prosodic Breaks of Bound and Multiple Comments

This work presents a pilot study for a prosodic analysis of two different spoken structures in spoken Italian within the theoretical framework of the Language into Act Theory (L-AcT): (i) chains of two or more Bound Comments (COB) that do not form a compositional informative and prosodic unit; (ii) compositional Information Units formed by two or more Multiple Comments (CMM), linked together by a conventional prosodic model that implements specific meta-illocutive structures. This work analyzes COBs and CMMs from the DB-IPIC Italian Minicorpus. Different prosodic cues are taken into account: f0 reset, pauses, final lengthening, intensity lowering and initial rush. The distinctive feature for COBs is a flat trend of f0 before the boundary, with a low number of f0 reset, while CMMs vary between different f0 shapes. Vowel elongation and a no rushing speech rate cooperate in perceiving the prolongation of one COB into another. Initial rush is a characteristic feature of CMMs, while the lengthening of the last vowel of the unit is easier to find at the end of a COB than in a CMM.