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Recensione a: De Marco Anna, Paone Emanuela, Dalle emozioni alla voce. Nuovi orizzonti della comunicazione in italiano L2, Roma 2016, Carocci
No full textQuesto prodotto recensisce un volume scritto da Anna De Marco ed Emanuela Paone sulla realizzazione delle emozioni nel parlato italian
Sul riconoscimento percettivo delle domande retoriche. On the perceptual recognition of rhetorical questions
No full textThis study investigates the perception of Italian minimal pair sentences formed by infor-
mation-seeking questions and rhetorical questions. Two perception experiments were per-
formed, the first using natural stimuli, the second using three different series of stimuli
generated by manipulating respectively: 1) the duration of the nuclear vowel, 2) the final
intonation contour, 3) both duration and final contour. The two types of questions behaved
differently. The results showed that temporal manipulations contributed to the rhetorical
interpretation more often than the manipulations of the final intonation contou
GENDER VARIABILITY IN THE PROSODIC PRODUCTION OF COMPLIMENTS IN ITALIAN: A PILOT STUDY
No full textThe aim of this research is to examine the prosody of Italian compliments. Previous research on compliments has devoted minimal attention to the prosodic aspect of these expressions, and little attention has been addressed to the question of compliments in Italian. However, issues regarding intonation and duration seem to be of pivotal importance in the construction of compliments and in the differentiation of compliment responses.
To this end, a corpus of oral Discourse Completion Tasks (DCT) was analysed to describe a contextual situation in which speakers were required to offer a compliment. Eight Italian participants (4 men and 4 women) were asked to read the DCTs and provide an appropriate response to the given scenario. The comparisons were made between male and female participants, without considering cross-gender compliments. There were notable differences in the lexical and intonation preferences of the female and male participants. Acoustic analysis revealed evidence of gender-based differences in the prosody of compliments, specifically in terms of pitch range and duration. In particular, male participants showed a wider pitch range and longer stressed nuclear vowels than their female counterparts. These findings suggest a correlation between the prosodic strategies observed and the lexical choices present in the compliments. The data indicated that men used longer compliments with low lexical density and a greater number of implicit expressions, whereas women produced shorter compliments with a higher semantic density than those produced by their male counterparts. This was due to the higher incidence of intensifiers and positive words used by women. These features increased the number of high-pitched accents in the intonation contours of women's utterances, as well as the global pitch range, resulting in more expressive and affective compliments compared to those of men. This study broadens our understanding of Italian compliments by examining them from both lexical and prosodic perspectives. By addressing the lack of research on the prosody of compliments—particularly within the underexplored context of Italian discourse—it makes a valuable contribution to the field of pragmatics
THE INTONATION OF RHETORICAL QUESTIONS IN ITALIAN
Full text linkThis research focuses on the intonation of rhetorical questions (RQs) in Italian. RQs are non-prototypical questions characterised by specific pragmatic features such as indirect and obvious meaning and the absence of an informative answer. The basic idea is that prosody, in its various verbal and paraverbal components, provides listeners with cues of illocutionary interpretation of RQs, facilitating their recognition in spontaneous speech. Although in the past the presence of a final falling intonation contour was assumed as a categorical feature of RQs, recent studies showed a more heterogeneous situation which did not exclude the possibility of rising intonation contours. Most of these studies were conducted on elicited speech samples (DCT or Role Play) by directly comparing string-identical information-seeking questions with rhetorical questions. The results obtained in several languages show that the differences between the two question types are never clear-cut and do not equally involve the same prosodic parameters (intonation contour, pitch range, duration). This highlights the presence of language-specific components. However, it is possible that the final results might have been influenced by both the mode of acquisition of the speech samples (which were almost always collected in a controlled environment), and by a certain neutralisation of discursive functions. The present research analyses a corpus of 100 spontaneous oral wh-RQs extracted from radio broadcasts. The study presents a phonological analysis of the intonation of RQs, looking at nuclear pitch accents and boundary tones. The results are then compared with those previously obtained for the same geographical area.
L’intonazione delle domande retoriche in italiano
Questa ricerca si concentra sull’intonazione delle domande retoriche (RQ) in italiano. Si tratta di domande non prototipiche caratterizzate da specifiche caratteristiche pragmatiche, tra cui la presenza di un significato indiretto e ovvio e l’assenza di una risposta informativa. L’idea di base è che la prosodia, nelle sue varie componenti verbali e paraverbali, fornisca agli ascoltatori degli indizi di interpretazione illocutiva delle RQ, facilitandone il riconoscimento nel parlato spontaneo. Sebbene in passato la presenza di un contorno intonativo discendente finale sia stata assunto come una caratteristica categorica delle RQ, studi recenti hanno mostrato una situazione più eterogenea che non esclude la possibilità di contorni intonativi ascendenti. La maggior parte di questi studi è stata condotta su campioni di parlato elicitato (DCT o Role Play), confrontando direttamente coppie frasali identiche formate da domande sincere e domande retoriche. I risultati ottenuti in diverse lingue mostrano che le differenze tra i due tipi di domanda non sono mai nette e non coinvolgono in egual misura i medesimi parametri prosodici (contorno intonativo, pitch range e durata), evidenziando la presenza di componenti linguo-specifiche. Tuttavia, è possibile che i risultati finali siano stati influenzati dalla modalità di acquisizione dei campioni di parlato (quasi sempre raccolti in un ambiente controllato) e da una certa neutralizzazione delle funzioni discorsive. La presente ricerca analizza un corpus di parlato spontaneo formato da 100 domande retoriche con struttura wh- estratte da trasmissioni radiofoniche. Lo studio fornisce un’analisi fonologica dell’intonazione delle domande, focalizzandosi sugli accenti intonativi nucleari e sui toni di confine. I risultati sono stati successivamente comparati con quelli precedentemente ottenuti per la stessa area geografica.
 
A Comparative Study of Compliment Responses Among Italian and Mexican Spanish Speakers
No full textThis paper explores compliment response (CR) strategies in Italian and Mexican Spanish from a cross-cultural pragmatics perspective. The research is based on a corpus consisting of 2400 compliment responses elicited through 12 written Discourse Completion Tasks (DCTs) which were administered to 200 participants in the form of open-ended questions. The data were categorised according to Castagneto and Ravetto’s (2015) taxonomy. The main aim of this study is to identify differences and similarities between the two cultural groups which have never been compared before, and to examine how gender can influence recipients’ responses. The results suggest cross-cultural similarities in Italian and Mexican CRs. The strategies used by both groups align with broader norms of positive politeness, confirming the view of compliments as face-enhancing acts. However, although Direct Acceptance is preferred in both languages, Mexicans tend to use opaque Acceptance strategies more frequently than Italians, with gender also playing a role. This behaviour is particularly evident among Mexican male participants, who often respond to compliments more evasively, using irony, proverbs, ritual formulas, or by deflecting the topic. Other differences include the average length of CRs in words. The data reveal that Mexicans tend to give longer responses than Italians, regardless of strategy or gender
Quale intonazione per le domande wh-?
No full textL’intonazione delle domande rappresenta uno dei temi più indagati nel vasto panorama delle ricerche dedicate alla prosodia. All’interno di questo vasto e variegato filone di ricerca, lo spazio dedicato all’intonazione della domanda wh- è stato per molti anni minore rispetto a quello riservato alle domande polari. In realtà, l’intonazione di questa interrogativa contiene diversi aspetti cruciali tra cui la definizione dell’andamento finale, la prominenza della parola wh-, l’individuazione dell’accento nucleare. Si tratta di aspetti interrelati, poiché dipendenti da restrizioni che operano sulla domanda modificandone la struttura su più piani. In questa sede, ci occuperemo in primo luogo della prominenza della parola wh- e dell’andamento intonativo finale. L’analisi di un corpus di parlato televisivo permetterà di verificare le tendenze in atto in un modello di pronuncia meridionale e di porre in evidenza eventuali criticità interpretative
Intonazione delle domande parziali nel dialetto di Monopoli (Bari)
No full textLo studio dell’intonazione dei dialetti italiani rappresenta ad oggi uno
dei settori più sguarniti all’interno di un filone di ricerca che negli ultimi decenni
ha visto crescere in modo esponenziale le indagini orientate verso l’analisi
prosodica delle numerose varietà geolinguistiche dell’italiano. Eppure
riteniamo che la definizione dei tratti intonativi potrebbe arricchire il quadro
descrittivo e interpretativo delle diverse aree dialettologiche fornendo, al
pari degli aspetti fonetici, morfosintattici o lessicali, informazioni utili per
avvalorare, o persino ridisegnare, i tracciati dei fasci isoglottici del territorio.
La ricerca che qui presentiamo, inserendosi in questo percorso di indagine,
prende in esame, utilizzando una metodologia sperimentale, l’intonazione
delle domande parziali del dialetto di Monopoli (prov. di Bari). L’intento è
quello di sostanziare un settore di ricerca finora poco navigato fornendo una
descrizione, seppure circoscritta per estensione territoriale e per ampiezza del
campione, di un modello intonativo dialettale di matrice pugliese
Sulle strategie di risposta ai complimenti in un corpus diatopicamente orientato
No full textThis research aims at exploring the pragmatic strategies of responding to compliments in a
speech sample of 654 compliment/response sequences elicited by means of written DCT. The corpus has a
specific diatopic connotation, since all respondents come from Apulia. For the analysis, the pragmatic
categorization proposed for Italian language by Castagneto and Ravetto in 2015 has been adopted. The
results reveal the presence of cross-gender and cross-ages differences. In details, males tend to use more
Limited Acceptance than females, while younger women show a strong preference for Direct Acceptance,
especially by Thanking and Reassurance Request. Differently, older female informants present a greater
degree of Limited Acceptance and a wider use of avoidance strategies, such as Deflection or Discredit
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