RICERCA ITALIANA     

Parlare italiano: theoretical and applied linguistic proposals.

Università degli Studi di Salerno

Abstract

The project 'Parlare italiano: teorie e applicazioni linguistiche' has three fundamental objectives: 1) to create a national research observatory for the study and the analysis of the Italian language, particularly addressed to investigations on the spoken communication and on the influence produced by the mass media on contemporary Italian; 2) to offer theoretical and applied instruments addressed to a better knowledge and diffusion of the Italian language, with particular attention to the teaching of Italian as foreign language; 3) to develop a training program for young researchers, especially dedicated to the collection, tagging and management of linguistic corpora.
The project 'Parlare italiano' will present different scientific and applied points of view, because it involves scholars working in several fields of research with great experience in the analysis of linguistic data, as it is shown by the results achieved in numerous national projects, some of which co-founded (Prin 1999; 2001; 2004) and by the relationships with numerous foreign universities, some of which involved in the present project. The experience gained in the previous initiatives allows today not only for a consolidation and an enlargement of the scientific knowledge, but also for making Parlare italiano, first and unique national initiative dedicated to spoken Italian, a ideal point of reference for the Italian Departments and the Institutes of Italian culture abroad.
This project will develop theoretical and applied instruments in the following thematic areas: Phonetics and Phonology, Prosody, Lexicon, Syntax, Pragmatics, Italian as L2, Spoken language and mass media, Computational linguistics.
The dissemination of the achieved results, which is a significant part of the project, will be guaranteed by the publication on the web site 'www.parlaritaliano.it', which is now being completed, thanks to the funds of a previous national projects (Prin 2004), to which all the research units of the present project have participated.
The implementation of the web site presents several original features from the informatic point of view. The web site is structured in order to offer an upgraded survey of the main theoretical and applied researches on Italian spoken language. All the contents are included in a complex relational database, thanks to which different ways of access and use will be possible. The external user can get information on the researchers, their publications, the tools and the projects realized within the Parlaritaliano circuit, through queries based on different keys: different thematic areas of linguistic disciplines, names of researchers, key words, universities, and so on. <<<

Principal Investigator

Maria Voghera Università degli Studi di SALERNO

Research Objectives

The project 'Parlare italiano: teorie e applicazioni linguistiche' aims to create a national research observatory for the study and the analysis of the Italian language. The project has several objectives:
A. the enlargement and enrichment of scientific knowledge about Italian as first and second language, with particular attention to the spoken communication and the changes produced by old and new mass media on contemporary Italian;
B. the dissemination of the achieved results;
C. a training program for young researchers.

A. The SCIENTIFIC OBJECTIVES pertain several areas of theoretical and applied linguistic research. Every research unit will contribute to one or more areas and will develop many cross-area subjects (details in section 2.3 and Modelli B). The general objectives are:
A1. Multilevel grammar analysis of Italian spoken language.
A2. Analysis of Italian spoken by foreigner learners.
A3. Language teaching.
A4. Computational linguistics.

A1. MULTILEVEL GRAMMAR ANALYSIS OF ITALIAN SPOKEN LANGUAGE. A primary aim is the creation of the permanent observatory of Italian spoken language. The research will provide a wide range of corpus-based linguistic analyses on many different levels of Italian spoken texts belonging to several varieties and registers. The main national corpora will be used: API, AVIP, CLIPS, LIP. We list here the main analysis levels.
Phonetics and Phonology
- analysis and classification of the rhythmic-prosodic phenomena of television speech;
- analysis of the acoustic correlates of connotative aspects of spoken language;
- analysis of voice and voice ‘labels’.
Syntax, prosody and lexicon
- analysis of the role played by syntactic, lexical and prosodic factors in determining clausal structures with a marked order of constituents (VS and OV);
Syntax and prosody
- relationship between prosodic and syntactic phrasing;
- prosodic analysis of phrasal verbs.
Syntax and informational structure
- analysis of syntactic and prosodic features of the topic units.
Syntax, pragmatics and prosody
- analysis of syntactic, prosodic and pragmatic features of locative expressions.
Pragmatics
- analysis of intensity phenomena in spoken language, in texts produced in different interational contexts and diamesic conditions (broadcasting, written communication via internet and so on);
- definition of analysis categories for specific communicative functions in task-oriented dialogues.
Pragmatics and prosody
- analysis of prosodic features of downgrading and upgrading phenomena in spoken language (discourse markers, address terms, attenuating conditional…)
Lexicon
- analysis of labels used by the main European dictionaries to tag linguistic usages related to spoken language.
Spoken language and mass media
- collection of a new corpus of cinematographic speech dating back the 30s-40s;
- comparison of the rhythmic-prosodic features of the collected corpus with those of contemporary radio, television and movie speech.

A2. ANALYSIS OF ITALIAN SPOKEN BY FOREIGNER LEARNERS. The primary goal is the study of the characteristics of the language as spoken by foreigners, in order to identify both the characterizing traits that distinguish it from the spoken language of native Italians and the traits common to the two varieties of spoken language, relating such traits to the influence of learning processes in different phases. This part of the project concerns the following thematic fields:
Lexicon
- enlargement of the corpus of L2 Italian collected by the Università per Stranieri di Siena in a previous national project (Prin 2004);
- quantitative and qualitative analysis of the lexicon of non-native speakers, based on the collected corpus.
Prosody
- analysis of prosodic features of the language spoken by foreigner learners of Italian as L2.


A3. LANGUAGE TEACHING. The primary goal is the creation of didactic instruments realized
specifically for educational agencies abroad dedicated to the diffusion of Italian language and culture. The applied instruments, we propose to create, will be based on the spoken-language material gathered during the project (see Objectives A2). Among the applied proposals with didactic aims to propose to the network for the diffusion of Italian, we can highlight the following:
- · Italian dictionaries for foreigners, based on usage lists extracted from the total corpus of the Italian spoken by foreigners (see Objectives A2);
- exercise books aimed at augmenting foreigners' vocabulary, specific to various levels of proficiency and linguistic typologies.

A4. COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS. An important part of the project is devoted to validate or develop applied instruments in the treatment of spoken language data: tagging and annotation software programs and friendly access to database queries. The specific objectives are:
- creation and validation of schemes for pragmatic tagging of spoken texts;
- pragmatic tagging of spoken dialogues and creation of a structured database;
- creation and management of a queryable database for spoken dialogues to treat a great amount of linguistic data.

B. The DISSEMINATION of the theoretical and applied results is a crucial part of the project, whose aim is the creation of a research agency devoted to the study of Italian language, with particular regard to the spoken communication, to promote the diffusion of Italian abroad, through the network of Italian Institutes of Culture and Italian Departments of foreign universities. In order to achieve this goal, the project has as central objective the development and the upgrading of the web site “parlaritaliano” (URL: www.parlaritaliano.it), which is now being completed within a previous national project (PRIN 2004), to which all the research units of the present project have participated. The web site is the frame within which all the results will be published and it is structured in order to offer an upgraded survey of the main theoretical and applied researches on Italian spoken language. The web site is structured in two sections. The first section presents a survey of the principal theoretical and applied instruments for the analysis of spoken language: corpora of spoken language, protocols and standard methods in spoken language analysis, linguistic tools for linguistic tagging of spoken texts, bibliographical references, links to other international initiatives and to single national projects. The second section of the web site, ‘Thematic Areas’, will include different areas of spoken language studies. All the contents are included in a complex relational database, thanks to which different ways of access and use will be possible. The external user can get information on the researchers, their publications, the tools and the projects realized within the Parlaritaliano circuit, through queries based on different keys: different thematic areas of linguistic disciplines, names of researchers, key words, universities, and so on.

C. A TRAINING PROGRAM FOR YOUNG RESEARCHERS is central to the entire project. All the research units have as objective to continue the scientific tuition activities already undertaken in the previous national project (Prin 2004), devoting more than 50% of financial resources to research grants (see section 3.3). This will allow the constitution of a national research task force of young graduates or postgraduates, who will have the opportunity to work with competent scholars in a comprehensive program of linguistic research. <<<

Timescale

24 months

National and international background

The variety and complexity of theoretical and applied problems implied in the study of spoken language requires the development of projects which integrate different research perspectives and make accessible at the scientific community data, analyses and applied proposals. The resources already available as result of a previous national project (Prin 2004), published in the web site URL: www.parlaritaliano.it, represent an effective and concrete basis for the enrichment and the dissemination of new scientific contents.
The state of the art of studies on spoken language has in recent years experienced a period of great development, thanks to the growing attention that has been dedicated to it in virtue of the fundamental role spoken language has taken on in the development and diffusion of the Italian language. With the birth of a commonly used language and above all a spoken language common to most Italians (De Mauro et al., 1994), the pressures of spoken language have become increasingly more insistent in the evolution of the Italian language and thus rightly attracted the interest of those who work in the field of languages. Beginning in the 1980s, in fact, there was a proliferation of researches and publications on spoken language which had the merit of dealing with issues connected to spoken Italian from multiple points of view and which contributed to a global and thus complete vision of linguistic, and other phenomena linked to spoken language. On the one hand, the interests of research were directed towards the study of the structural aspects of spoken Italian, and on the other hand were aimed at investigating the pragmatic level, thus involving numerous research perspectives within language sciences, from theoretical linguistics to discourse analysis.
In very recent times, the general interest in spoken Italian has been extended to the Italian spoken by non-natives, thanks in part to some recent research projects that took into consideration a variety of spoken Italian characterized by the fact of being produced by
speakers or learners who have as their L1 not Italian but any other language, and for whom Italian thus becomes L2, whether it is learned in Italy or abroad. Furthermore, the entrance of immigrants in Italy brought about processes of spontaneous learning of Italian, mainly outside traditional educational contexts and characterized by a highly systematic nature. We should add to this phenomenon the increased international interest in the Italian language, which has seen a rapid diffusion and involved foreign learners no longer interested in our language as a language of culture, but also motivated by practical interests (De Mauro et al, 2002). The interaction of these two phenomena contributed to the growth of a great interest in spoken Italian as a model of reference for those who learn Italian L2 in a spontaneous or formal context, and thus prompted many researchers to investigate not only the Italian spoken by natives, but also the Italian spoken by non-natives (Bagna, Carloni, Machetti, 2004). Following from these perspectives, there can be numerous points of view from which to carry out the research, and thus it is possible to involve different language sciences or more generally semiotic, in order to recognize the pressures that the Italian spoken
by foreigners applies on the evolution of the contemporary Italian linguistic situation, studying the dynamics of its modification and possible future evolutions.
Spoken language, as it has been put in evidence from the linguistic studies in the last decades (Sornicola 1981, Berruto 1985; Berretta 1994; Bazzanella 1994, Voghera 1992 and more recent publications such as Albano Leoni, Giordano 2006 as well as the round tables during the Naples 2003 and 2006 conferences) is characterized, in a pragmatic and interactional linguistics perspective, for the particular communicative situation in which it takes place, in which the face-to-face interaction may be seen as the prototypical model of dialogical exchanges (Bazzanella 1994, 2002). The use of the phonic-acustic channel (Cresti 2000), the temporal synchrony of production and reception, and the spatial co-presence of speaker(s) and hearer(s) (Bazzanella 1994) have significant effects on the linguistic choices and on the sequential development of talk, as well as on the reception modalities, increasing the context-dependence of talk (Akman, Bazzanella 2003) and its emotive component (Wierzbicka 1992, Bazzanella, Kobau 2002).
In this perspective, the study of the properties of the transmission channel becomes very significant. Particularly, the study of voice, that is the study of the physical correlates of the manifestations of emotions and feelings and the study of the connotative aspects of the voice and its characteristics, as well as its physiological, psychological and/or socio-cultural foundations. The voice is indeed the main device of human communication, through which linguistic structure along with feelings and emotions are simultaneously expressed.
The importance of phonetic and phonological phenomena in the signification process of spoken language is revealed by the rhythmic and prosodic features. Previous studies undertaken in a preceding national project (Prin 2004) have demonstrated the changes of the speaking styles occurred in the television speech during the last forty years, comparing texts produced by journalist in the ’60 with news bulletin recorded today (Pettorino, Giannini 2005). The modern television speech shows a higher speech rate, essentially due to the disappearing of the long silent pauses and the shifting of silences. Other experimental studies on radio, television and movie dubbing speech pointed out the speeding up of speech rate from 1970 to 2000. In conclusion, in the last forty years the speech used by the mass media has undergone considerable changes and, considering the great influence that the mass media have on everyday speech, it is reasonable to suppose that similar changes are occurring in conversational Italian. Data on spoken Italian confirm this hypothesis.
Spoken language is influenced not only by the old media, but also by the new media. The new technologies have brought about significant changes, which must be analysed in different perspectives, with special attention to the various forms of technically mediated interaction. These new forms of interaction allow for verification of the basic conversational rules studied by Conversation Analysis, and have become an important testing field for new models of analysis (Violi, Coppock 1999, Baracco 2002, Danieli 2002, Pistolesi 2005, Levine, Scollon 2004, Ursini 2005). Several phenomena typical of spoken face-to-face interaction have indeed been observed in (synchronous or asynchronous) computer-mediated dialogue, in which writing is constrained by the need for immediacy. Even if the pragmatic conditions related to the latter are diverse and differ from those of spoken face-to-face interaction, such analogies may help us to envisage the specific features of orality in a new perspective (Bazzanella 2005, Orletti 2004).
Furthermore, spoken language studies can be a useful and challenging terrain to test our grammatical model and hypotheses since it allows us to delineate the role played by the different levels of linguistic codification more clearly than written language does. Data coming from texts spoken by foreigners learners can be usefully analysed because they enlighten, in the different stages of acquisition, the progressive construction of the target-language grammar.
At syntactic level spoken language constantly present short clauses that are not hierarchically structured, but rather adjoined to one another (Sornicola, 1981; Voghera 1992; Cresti and Moneglia 2005). A serial structure permits to both speaker and hearer to progress step by step without overloading the memory and reducing the potential loss of information. On the contrary, a hierarchical structure needs a complex planning, and, above all, a long-term calculation that is not practical in speaking. In a spoken text we are likely to find a smaller number of government/subordination relationships and a greater number of relationships of coordinative and additional type, in comparison with what normally happens in a written text of the same length.
Obviously the inter- and intra-clausal features of spoken texts are connected: short clauses often imply short and simple phrases. Many studies (Miller, Weinert 1998; Voghera 2001; Voghera et al. 2004) have also revealed that spoken language is not only characterized by the relationships among clauses, but also by the internal structure of clauses. In spoken texts we find lighter phrases, as far as the syntactic structure and the length are concerned. Theoretical proposals to describe the grammatical weight of a constituent usually take into consideration only syntactic factors (among others Hawkins 1994), which are regarded as the main processing/parsing constraints. Actually, recent works on Italian spoken language (Bonvino 2005; Voghera et al. 2004) have revealed the need of considering syntactic complexity as part of a more general notion of grammatical weight, which is determined not only by syntactic structure, but even by lexical, prosodic and (possibly) semantic factors.
As it is known (Hawkins, 1994), the grammatical weight of phrases is related to their position: given a heavier constituent, it is more probably that it will occur in the right part of the clause. This seems to be one of the main factors in determining the occurrence of marked word order. Unfortunally, we do not have systematic data on the relationship between grammatical weight and word order in Italian.
Syntax and the informational component, otherwise, are both related to prosodic structure (Inkelas e Zec 1995, Ladd 1996). Although syntactic units and prosodic units are not isomorphic (Inkelas e Zec 1995), several hypotheses about the correlation between syntax and intonation have been recently proposed. Corpus-driven researches and cross-linguistic studies on romance languages provide some preliminary results on this topic (Voghera 1992, Zubizarreta 1998, Cresti e Moneglia 2005): two relevant examples of this novel approach are represented by a prosodic model related to a specific syntactic model developed on the basis of the analysis of spoken language (Martin 2003), and by a preliminary analysis of the combinations of prosodic units (accent types, boundary types, prosodic phrases) associated to different levels of branching and to the possible variations in the weight of syntactic constituents (Zubizarreta 1998, Selkirk 2000, Avesani e Vayra 2000, Elordieta et al. 2005, D’Imperio et al. 2005).
The analysis of intonational phenomena occurring in different samples of speech homogeneous as for word order and syntactic weight would surely contribute to define the interplay of syntax and prosody in Italian.
Prosodic structure is strictly connected not only to syntax, but also to information (Firbas 1987; Halliday 1967, Voghera 1992), as it helps the listener to interpret the message highlighting its relevant parts. Tone Units (TU) work as production units in speech, as phonetic/phonological domains where pragmatic needs, semantic planning, information packaging and morphosyntactic structure of the message interact. Furthermore, prosodic cues (such as prominences, boundaries, phrasing, position in the pitch range) indicate the role played by a constituent in the informational dynamics of the message (given/new, topic/focus, topic/comment, theme/rheme; Halliday 1967, Firbas 1987, Lambrecht 1994, Cresti 2000). Recently, more and more studies investigate the relations between prosodic and information structure. Among the most debated issues, the existence of topic-specific accent and boundaries (Gundel et al. 1997), and the relation between prosodic and information focus (Lambrecht 1994, Ladd 1996) come out.
Although the interaction between linguistic levels is crucial in speech in general, dialogical speech represents a particularly suitable ground for investigations concerning those multilevel relations. Recent studies (on Italian, among others, Grice &amp; Savino 2004, Giordano &amp; Crocco 2005) pointing out the complex interrelations that involve pragmatic, syntax, and prosody, show that the relative weight of these factors varies according to context and aims of the interaction.
Moreover, because dialogue can be considered as the prototypical conversational interaction (see, among others, Tannen 1989; Bazzanella 2002), several investigations have analyzed both forms and kinds of dialogical exchanges. In corpus linguistics, a number of different schemes for pragmatic coding have been developed, to annotate different kinds of speech including dialogue. Overall, the purpose of pragmatic coding is to identify the pragmatic function of a speech act in its communicative context. One of the most well known and complex scheme is the DAMLS (and its extension SWBD-Damsl), that allows multidimensional labelling and partly reflects Searle’s speech act typology. More specific schemes, such as Verbmobil, Flammia, Linlin, Coconut, are instead monodimensional. The most famous among these monodimensional schemes is the Map Task coding scheme, developed at the HCRC of Edinburgh (Anderson et al. 1992; Carletta et al. 1996). The Map Task scheme was recently applied to Italian, also in an extended version (Castagneto and Ferrari 2003).
The complexity and the depth of the interaction between different linguistic levels, which is extremely evident in speech, encourage the development of integrated approaches, both in theoretical and applied research. An interesting example of an integrated approach in the field of applied research is the construction of multilevel databases. Such a database, which allows cross-level queries, helps to gather data on the way linguistic levels interact in speech. The development of such databases requires both a complex theoretical linguistic design and a sophisticated data management. For this reason, it has given a strong impulse to research on speech technology, and to the development of software and dedicated tools, such as AGTK (Annotation Graphs Tool Kit, see Bird, Liberman 2001). <<<