This dissertation investigates some aspects of the interface between pragmatics and prosody and it aims to determine the role played by intonation in expressing communicative functions. For this purpose, among the different speech acts, this study explores some pragmatic and prosodic aspects of requests in task-oriented dialogues. The corpus is composed of Neapolitan Italian dialogues and Spanish dialogues (in the variety spoken in Barcelona) and we examined it intra and interlinguistically, in order to contribute to theoretical and methodological developments of the field of teaching Italian and Spanish as foreign languages.
In both linguistic levels –pragmatic and prosodic–, results do reveal interesting differences between the two languages. Pragmatic analysis indicates that the same kinds of requests occur with a different frequency and distribution and that they have different functional values as far as discourse topic introduction and management are concerned. Prosodic analysis –consisting in a phonetic description of tonal contours of the requests– pays special attention to if and how information structure and morfo-syntax correlate with intonation. Results suggest that information structure and prosodic realizations do interact in so far as pragmatic functions of topic and comment systematically show specific melodic patterns. On the contrary, our analysis does not reveal a direct connection between morfo-syntactic structures and melodic patterns of request, either in Italian or in Spanish. Interlinguistic comparison shows that some kinds of requests present a different intonation in Italian and Spanish, with relevant implications on teaching Italian to Spanish-speaking learners and, vice versa, on teaching Spanish to Italian-speaking learners.
