Discourse markers and turn-planning at the pragmatics–prosody interface: The case of allora in spoken Italian

Abstract

In recent research on discourse markers (DMs), it has been shown that these elements collaborate with prosody to convey crucial information about the organization of the discourse, both at the level of a single turn and the level of the overall conversation.In this article, we analyze the DM allora ‘then’, occurring in turn-initial position and followed by a silent pause in spontaneous monolingual dialogues between Italian native speakers. Various prosodic measures are taken comparing allora with the following intonational phrase (IP), to investigate the discursive relationship between the DM and the rest of the turn.The results show that the DM is peripheric as opposed to the general turn’s prosodic planning: it is produced at a higher articulation rate and with a narrower range of pitch values than the following IP, and a pitch reset is visible between the two.The data suggest that allora and the following IP constitute two distinct units in the turn’s planning. We argue that as much as speakers manipulate their pitch range on the recursive side of the utterance to convey syntactic dependencies, they produce higher or lower turn onset, to express discursive-pragmatics relations between intonation units.