Discourse Levels in Spoken Language: Parentetical Structures and Reported Speech

This study explores the role of parenthetical structures and reported speech in the organization of spontaneous spoken discourse, focusing on their functional and prosodic features. Building on the Language into Act Theory (L-AcT), the paper examines how the two discourse-levels work,interact, and contribute to the overall architecture of speech.Parentheticals, operating within an intra-enunciative plane, introduce secondary content that isprosodically marked by pitchlowering,boundary pauses, and reduced prominence. In contrast, reported speechintroduces an external or fictive voice, establishinga meta-enunciative level often marked by a quotative frame and prosodic shiftsuch as pitch increasesor expanded pitch ranges. Despite their formal and functional differences, bothphenomena exhibit complementary roles in structuring discourseand challenge the notion of a linear discourse model by revealing a stratified organization of speech, where utterances can be embedded, layered, and recontextualized in real time. Based on empirical data from a corpus-driven analysis, this study highlights the close relationship between prosody and discourse function, showing how speakers manage multiple communicative layerswithin a single interaction.