Uma metodologia empírica para a identificação e descrição de ilocuções e a sua aplicação para o estudo da Ordem em PB e italiano

Abstract

This thesis sets forth a new empirical methodology for the study of illocutions and applies it to the study of the illocution of Order in four of its possible attitudinal realizations (i.e. attitude of Reference, Politeness, Instruction and Authority) in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) and Italian. The methodology involves the investigation of the prosodic interplay between the categories of illocution and attitude in the realization of utterances, delving into the concept of illocutionary prosodic form and highlighting the importance of a pragmatic approach based on empirical observations for the study of speech acts. The theoretical basis for this dissertation is the Language into Act Theory (CRESTI, 2000; RASO, 2012; MONEGLIA; RASO, 2014), in which the utterance is defined as the smallest linguistic sequence that shows pragmatic and prosodic interpretability signaled by a terminal prosodic break. Illocution is regarded as the verbal action performed by the speaker on the addressee by means of the utterance. For an utterance to be able to accomplish an illocution, it must show a set of prosodic properties associated with the illocution; this set of properties is called illocutionary prosodic form. Attitude is defined as the manner in which the illocution is realized (e.g. irritated, polite, enticing, authoritarian). The prosodic scope of the attitude is the entire tone unit. The methodology here proposed comprises two phases, one empirical and the other experimental: (a) identification of illocutions in a corpus through a pragmatic analysis of utterances; (b) elicitation in a controlled environment of utterances that are pragmatically compatible with the ones found in the corpus and description of the illocutionary prosodic form. By analyzing the data obtained from the C-ORAL-BRASIL a spontaneous speech corpus of Brazilian Portuguese (RASO; MELLO, 2012) and the utterances elicited in simulated environment, it was possible to observe that the illocution of Order in BP is realized by utterances whose nuclei show two f0 movements. The first one may be flat or rising, with the f0 peak aligned with the first post-stressed syllable of the utterance. The second one is always a falling movement. The first f0 peak shows a variation ranging from 85% to 95%, depending on the attitude and the amount of locutive content of the utterance. The onset of the unit and the minimum f0 value show a much smaller variation (33-45% for the onset and 17-29% for the minimum value), which suggests that the f0 contour of the illocution of Order may correlate with the level of the first peak. Furthermore, it was observed that the duration of the first nuclear, stressed vowel must be compatible with the duration of the last nuclear, stressed one, which in turn must be realized in a falling movement. The analysis of Italian utterances that were elicited in artificial environment showed that the fundamental properties that were observed for the illocution of Order and its attitudes in BP also apply to Italian. Finally, this dissertation documents several illocutions found in the C-ORAL-BRASIL corpus that are absent in the inventory proposed by the LABLITA group (MONEGLIA, 2011). Those illocutions are as follows: Offer, Confirmation Question, Permission to Speak, Request for Complete Repetition, Expression of Sustained Attention, and Request for Assent.