Pragmatic functions and phonetic reduction: Cioè and cè in contemporary spoken Italian

IF 1.8 1区文学 0 LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS

Journal of Pragmatics Pub Date : 2025-01-01 DOI:10.1016/j.pragma.2024.12.006

Daniela Mereu , Silvia Dal Negro

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引用次数: 0

Abstract

This paper investigates the phenomenon of phonetic reduction of the reformulation marker cioè, a very frequent lexical item in spoken Italian. This word has attracted both scholarly attention and popular interest over the years because of its multifunctionality and ability to convey a variety of social meanings. On top of this, the recent appearance of the reduced form cè has also been observed to have become increasingly frequent even in informal written usages.

This contribution aims at exploring the validity of informal observations that have been made about the distribution of cè and cioè. This is achieved by providing an acoustic analysis of the occurrences of this lexical item within a corpus of conversational spoken Italian, as well as by relating the phonetically full and reduced forms of these items to the main functions they perform. The results of the analysis conducted in this paper confirm the prevalence of phonetically reduced types over full forms, as well as the functional specialization of the unreduced form, two facts which seem to support the thesis that an ongoing change in formal and functional terms is happening.

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语用功能和语音缩减：当代意大利语口语中的Cioè和cè

本文研究了意大利语口语中一个非常常见的词汇项目cioè的语音弱化现象。这个词多年来吸引了学术界的关注和大众的兴趣，因为它的多功能性和传达各种社会意义的能力。最重要的是，最近出现的缩略形式cè甚至在非正式的书面用法中也越来越频繁。这篇文章的目的是探讨关于cè和cioè分布的非正式观察的有效性。这是通过在会话意大利语口语语料库中提供该词汇项目出现的声学分析，以及将这些项目的语音全称和缩略形式与它们所执行的主要功能联系起来来实现的。本文进行的分析结果证实了语音简化类型在完整形式中的普遍存在，以及未简化形式的功能专业化，这两个事实似乎支持了形式和功能术语正在发生持续变化的论点。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Journal of Pragmatics Multiple-

CiteScore

3.90

自引率

18.80%

发文量

219

期刊介绍： Since 1977, the Journal of Pragmatics has provided a forum for bringing together a wide range of research in pragmatics, including cognitive pragmatics, corpus pragmatics, experimental pragmatics, historical pragmatics, interpersonal pragmatics, multimodal pragmatics, sociopragmatics, theoretical pragmatics and related fields. Our aim is to publish innovative pragmatic scholarship from all perspectives, which contributes to theories of how speakers produce and interpret language in different contexts drawing on attested data from a wide range of languages/cultures in different parts of the world. The Journal of Pragmatics also encourages work that uses attested language data to explore the relationship between pragmatics and neighbouring research areas such as semantics, discourse analysis, conversation analysis and ethnomethodology, interactional linguistics, sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, media studies, psychology, sociology, and the philosophy of language. Alongside full-length articles, discussion notes and book reviews, the journal welcomes proposals for high quality special issues in all areas of pragmatics which make a significant contribution to a topical or developing area at the cutting-edge of research.