RICERCA ITALIANA     

Parlare italiano: an observatory of linguistic usages.

Università degli Studi di Salerno

Abstract

The project Parlare italiano: an observatory on Italian usages has four fundamental objectives: 1) to plan a national website that collects the most recent theoretical and applied developments of the researches about spoken language; 2) to create an observatory of the linguistic usages of the Italian spoken language; 3) to delineate and to implement standard and formalized methods and procedures for the study of spoken language; 4) to develop a training program for young researchers.
In order to guarantee the greatest transparency and verifiability of the research, the project has as objective to respect the following criteria: a) publicity of reference corpora; b) publicity of methods and analysis procedures; c) publicity of results.
The project Parlare italiano will present different scientific and applied points of view, because it involves scholars working in several fields of research (Linguistics, Computer Science, Audiology) with great research experience in the study of spoken language both in national and international projects, some of which co-founded (AVIP, API, IPar). This project will develop theoretical and applied instruments in the following thematic areas: Phonetics and Phonology; Prosody; Morphology; Lexicon; Syntax; Semantics; Discourse and Conversational Analysis; Pragmatics; Diachrony of spoken language; Italian as Foreign Language; Spoken language and Mass-media; Language Disorders; Computational Linguistics; Speech Technology. Each >>>

Principal Investigator

Maria VOGHERA Università degli Studi di SALERNO

Research Objectives

The present project is a national initiative, whose aim is to create a comprehensive point of reference for researches on Italian spoken language. The project has several objectives that can be list as:
A.Editorial objectives;
B.Scientific objectives;
C.Training objectives

A. A central objective of the project is the creation of a website that will be the frame within which the woks of the different research units will be published. The website ‘Parlare italiano: osservatorio degli usi linguistici' will be structured in two sections. The first section, ‘State of the Art', presents a survey of the principal theoretical and applied instruments for the analysis of spoken language, and particularly of Italian 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 (see section 2.2.). The second section of the website, ‘Thematic Areas', will include different areas of spoken language studies (see B1, B2, B3). Research Units: Universities of Naples "Federico II"-Dept. of Physic Sciences, Salerno.

B.The scientific objectives of the projects can be grouped in different field of linguistic research. The research units will contribute to one or more areas and will develop many cross-area subjects (details in Modelli B):
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First Results

WEB SITE PLANNING: at the end of the first year, we aim to complete the conceptual definition of the whole structure. An internal document will be written with all the technical information and a preliminary version of the main reference pages: a prototype that can be modified and improved in the definitive version.

With regard to the parallel activities of development of section ‘State of the Art' of the website, the research units will contribute to a first survey
- of corpora of Italian and other languages collected in private and public projects;
- of tools and instruments for the multilevel analysis of spoken language;
- of representations and codifications standard formats developed within national and international projects and initiatives.

With regard to the Thematic Areas, investigated by the research units, the intermediate results will consist in:
- publication of acquired and/or annotated, labelled, classified spoken language corpora ;
- internal documents describing the acquired corpora;
- internal documents with norms and technical details on data representation and codification, already existing or prepared for this purpose;
- internal documents with norms and technical details on the software programs used for acquisition, codification, analysis and data processing;
- internal documents on the validation process of analysis tools and initial scientific hypothesis; >>>

Timescale

24 months

National and international background

Most of the linguistic descriptions and analysis show that spoken language differs systematically from written language. Spoken texts, even belonging to different diastratic and diafasic registers, present similar regular features (‘costanti del parlato'), that make them very different from written texts.
This depends on the ideational and productive/receptive processes in the two modalities. Spoken language exhibits an ‘intrinsic functional discontinuity': the on-line production of speech is physically continuous, but actually produces texts, which are deeply discontinuous. This is true because dialogue is the primary model of speech and it is by definition fragmented: interruptions, project changes, speakers overlapping, insertions of receiver are normal features of spontaneous dialogues. Therefore, a spoken text is the result of a multiparty activity to which both speaker and receiver contribute, so the speaker knows in advance that her/ his utterance can be interrupted, and that the initial textual strategy can dramatically be altered. This determines different possibilities of planning and structuring the message, that has consequences on every level of the text.
The increasing amount of investigations in the last decades has also shown that a deep understanding of the structure of spoken texts depends on the explanation of the entire physical process of transmission and reception of the speech signal. Fundamental data derive from researches on the >>>