Some comparison between UBLI and C-ORAL-ROM

The paper focuses on the reference units for the analysis of spoken language chosen by the Center of Usage-Based Linguistic Informatics (UBLI) of the Tokyo University for Foreign Studies, identified as function and discourse-sentence, and those chosen by the Linguistic Laboratory of the Italian Department (LABLITA) of the Università di Firenze, identified as speech act and utterance. The comparison has its origins in a debate held in the work-shop on C-ORAL-ROM organized by UBLI, and deals with the theoretical frame-work at the base of the two perspectives, along with a common general conception of language (seen as linguistic behavior) and an interest in language as a process. Interestingly, many points of similarity emerged between the independent repertory of UBLI, which extracted 71 types of pragmatic function from corpora of Japanese and many other languages employed for teaching, and that of LABLITA, which identified about 70 speech act types in its Italian spontaneous corpora. The major difference seems to lie in the syntactic definition of the UBLI discourse-sentence which implies a correlation between “normal syntactic forms” and the possibility to develop a specific function in the conversation, compared with the strictly pragmatic LABLITA definition of utterance and its necessary prosodic identification, which assumes the dynamic interaction between speakers is the only input for the accomplishment of a speech act.