Le unità del parlato e la dimensione testuale della comunicazione spontanea: comparazioni teoriche e analisi linguistiche

This paper offers a theoretical overview of specific units of spoken language that go beyond the utterance: textually broad and pragmatically unitary structures of spontaneous speech in which the language “builds a text”. These macrostructures are recognizable thanks to specific prosodic properties and appear in the form of juxtaposed sequences of illocutions. The reviewed theoretical frameworks outline a syntactic-semantic representation and a prosodic-pragmatic description of the structures. Conversational Analysis, the Autosegmental-Metric model, Narration Analysis, Sornicola’s studies on oral planning in narrative macro-structures, and the Language into Act Theory are presented. Based on the theoretical suggestions, the results of a corpus-based analysis of the Italian language are proposed. The informative, prosodic, illocutionary, syntactic, and textual features are described and discussed.