| الوصف: |
This study follows the framework set by the strand of corpusstudies aimed at investigating and unveiling the role of prolongationsas linguistic elements by comparing their use in differentlanguages, ranging from Germanic languages (Swedish,American English, German) to Tok Pisin, Chinese Mandarin,Hungarian and Hebrew, and provides evidence on the use ofprolongation in a Romance language, namely Italian. Theanalysis is conducted on different speech styles, i.e., descriptiveinformal dialogic speech as well as informative monologicspeech, and concerns the distributional characterisations of prolongationphenomena, their segmental and durational traits alsoconsidering the comparison with another type of voiced speechmanagement phenomena, that is non-verbal vocalisations. Themain results show that in the considered Italian data speakersuse prolongations more frequently than non-verbal vocalisationsand the latter are generally longer, which argues for thefact that these two voiced phenomena are differently involvedin speech management. Then, the distributional and segmentalfeatures of prolongations in Italian as compared to otherlanguages support the idea that prolongations, as linguistic elements,are subjected, to a certain extent, to the phonotacticconstraints of languages. |
