Le unità di informazione Parentetiche alla periferia destra del Comment nella Teoria della Lingua in Atto

According to the Language Into Act Theory, Parenthetical units insert in the Utterance information placed on a secondary locutive plan concerning the Topic / Comment relation. They can appear in all but not in the first position of the utterance and are never compositional with another information unit. Because of prosodic similarities, however, Parenthesis placed at the right periphery of the Comment can be confused with Appendix units, which express redundant information complementing the Comment. Based on the IPIC Information Structure Data-Base the paper explores the reasons which allow their detection in Italian Spontaneous Speech Corpora. Because of their semantic values, Modal evaluations and Metalinguistic commentaries (the large majority of Parenthesis in speech) introduce a jump in the perspective of the utterance, which places them on a secondary locutive plan and can never be Appendixes. On the contrary, other types of expressions that can also fill the Parenthetical unit (conjunctions, if-sentences, adverbials and external arguments, long parenthetical) can be, in principle, also integrations of the Comment. The paper argues that the parenthetical interpretation of these information units will remain under-determined unless the speaker signals this value through prosodic or multimodal cues. Moreover, according to our finding, long parenthesis in the final position are not performed as information units of the utterance but rather as fully autonomous “parenthetical utterance”