Prosody and Information Structure in Spoken Chinese: A Study Based on the C-ORAL-ZHONG Corpus and Language into Act Theory

This dissertation investigates the relationship between prosody and information structure in spontaneous spoken Chinese, adopting the Language into Act Theory (L-AcT) as its theoretical framework. L-AcT, developed at the University of Florence, considers the utterance as the fundamental unit for spoken language analysis and integrates pragmatic and prosodic perspectives. The main goal of this research is to explore how prosodic features—such as pauses, resets, and intonational contours—contribute to discourse segmentation and to the expression of pragmatic functions. To address these questions, a specialized corpus, C-ORAL-ZHONG, was created. The corpus consists of 69 minutes of spontaneous speech collected in family, private, and public life contexts. It was carefully transcribed and annotated, aligning transcriptions with prosodic cues to enable both quantitative and qualitative analysis of reference units. The dissertation is organized into six chapters: after a theoretical introduction, it presents a literature review and describes the C-ORAL-ZHONG corpus. The methodology chapter explains segmentation criteria and reports inter-annotator agreement tests. Subsequent chapters provide quantitative results on the distribution of prosodic and informational units, with a focus on interrupted utterances and complex structures. The final chapter offers a detailed study of sentence-final particles and Topic units, highlighting their role in information packaging and discourse organization. The findings confirm that spoken Chinese fits well within the L-AcT framework and reveal that Topic units play a key role in structuring discourse. Moreover, the study shows that prosody systematically interacts with pragmatic functions to guide interpretation and facilitate communication. By combining empirical data and theoretical reflection, this research contributes to a better understanding of the interface between prosody and pragmatics in Mandarin Chinese and offers valuable insights for intonation studies, corpus-based linguistics, and the typology of spoken language.