La Stanza nella Teoria della Lingua in Atto

This paper presents a corpus-based analysis of Italian spontaneous speech in the theoretical framework of Language into Act Theory (Cresti 2000; Cresti & Moneglia 2010; Moneglia & Raso 2014). A selection of IPIC database (Panunzi & Gregori 2012) has been studied to describe the syntactic behaviors of specific structures named stanzas. Stanzas are terminated sequences prosodically recognizable in the speech flow as chains of nuclei on the same prosodic level. This structure marks nearly 10% of the spoken communication and it is typical of monologues, stories, and life narrations. The analysis shows an additive and flat syntax mostly composed by chained clauses and juxtapositions, without a hierarchical order: stanzas are usually formed by main clauses one after the other or connected through coordinative conjunctions; subordination is not so common and mostly in the form of causal or relative subordinate clauses.