Clitics and anaphoric relations in informational patterning: A corpus driven research in spontaneous spoken italian (C-ORAL-ROM)

The paper deals with the actual use of clitics, presenting corpus-driven research run on C-ORAL-ROM and devoted to the quantitative and qualitative description of cliticization and anaphoric relations in everyday Italian. According to Teoria della Lingua in atto (Language into Act Theory: LAcT) an utterance corresponds to an information pattern which can be comprised of many Information Units (IU), characterized by specific pragmatic functions and identified by prosody. It must be underlined that about one third of spontaneous utterances record at least one instance of Cliticization, confirming the linguistic relevance of this kind of pronominalization process. The clitic distribution in the different IUs, their functions (anaphoric and cataphoric relations, semantic integration, morphologic flexion), and their percentage show that their usage depends on the information organization of the utterance. About 81% of clitics occur in the Comment IU, devoted to the accomplishment of the utterance’s illocutionary force, with the clitic form used most often being the reflexive/impersonal/passive si. Only 22% of clitic usages are devoted to anaphoric and cataphoric relations, as cataphora are rare and limited mostly to the relation between a clitic in a Comment IU and a lexical consequent in an Appendix IU. While a large number of anaphora find their antecedent beyond the utterance boundary i.e. in previous utterances, no case of cataphora with its lexical referent in successive utterances has been found.