The Discourse Connector according to the Language into Act Theory: data from IPIC Italian

The paper introduces the notion of Discourse Connector information unit (DCT) as a Discourse marker function. According to the Language into Act Theory, DCT is dedicated to signal the addressee a link between the preceding discourse and the pragmatic unit that is about to be uttered. The DCT can be identified since it is performed through a dedicated prosodic unit with specific modulation features. Research carried out on the Data-Base IPIC shows that in Italian the lexical repertory of the DCT consists of conjunctions and connectives/adverbials. The semantics of the DCT is vague and for this reason its occurrences can be deleted or substituted with other arbitrary connectives keeping the pragmatic interpretability of the utterance. The frequency of DCTs in relation to the number of utterances might appear rather low (2.81%), however its occurrences constitutes 12.2% of discourse marker units. The DCT occurs mainly at the onset of utterances, but when it occurs in a stanza, it signals that the spoken text goes on.