Some notes on the Hearts and Navy excerpts according to the Language into Act Theory

The paper sketches the Language into Act Theory and how it catches the difference between the Navy monologue and the Hearts dialogue. According to L-AcT, two types of reference units, both ending with a prosodic terminal break are identified: utterance matching with a single speech act and stanza expressing a flow of thought through an adjunction process. Navy is a sequence of two narrative stanzas with a complex informational organization, while Hearts is organized in 11 utterances showing high illocutionary variation. The core of the information pattern is the Comment accomplishing the illocutionary force. The information structure, expressing a closed set of functions, is in one-to-one correspondence with the prosodic structure. The linguistic content is not compositional across information units.