Complex illocutive units in the Language into Act Theory: an analysis of non-terminal prosodic breaks of Bound Comments and Lists

This work presents a preliminary analysis of a prosodic description of two different structures in spoken language 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) of the List type, linked together by a conventional prosodic pattern that implements a specific meta-illocutive structure. This study aims to underline specific features of the COB units and the List-type CMM units, detecting prosodic properties of the Italian and the Brazilian Portuguese spoken languages. Through a specific script for Praat software, different parameters are automatically calculated: f0 mean, f0 shift, f0 slope/variation rate, duration, spectral emphasis. Our results highlighted a common prosodic behavior in COB-units in terms of f0 slope (rising in the stressed syllable before the boundary and falling on the unstressed one just before the boundary), and a great similarity between the two COBs and Lists.