Parenthetical Units and Structures in Italian and German spoken language: Prosodic and textual analysis

This work presents the prosodic analysis of Parenthetical Units in spoken Italian and German within the theoretical framework of the Language into Act Theory (L-AcT), which defines such textual units as Parentheses (PARs), i.e. devices used by the speaker to add information to the utterance on a secondary level of the text. Data were extracted from the Italian Minicorpus of the DB-IPIC resource and from the German FOLK corpus. Linguistic content and distribution of Parentheses were analyzed. Furthermore, a subset of approximately 100 PARs was selected for each corpus and these were prosodically analyzed in relation to the mandatory textual units called Comment within the L-AcT framework, which express the illocutionary force of the utterance. The results show similar characteristics for the two languages, such as an overall decrease of f0 values of the PARs and the correlation between the length of the PARs, as well as the presence of additional units separating it from the COM, and frequency values. The authors also noted the presence of Parenthetical Structures that go beyond the level of the simple textual unit, which could suggest that Parentheses are a wider textual strategy operating as inter-utterance.