Category-building lists between grammar and interaction

Lists are one of the most common devices that are used in interaction to refer to a category. Yet, there are only few studies that analyze the relationship between lists and categorization. Our paper aims at advancing our knowledge of this relationship, and of lists in general. From a theoretical point of view, we discuss the benefits of integrating the Construction Grammar approach to lists adopted in Masini et al. (2018) with some of the basic assumptions of Interactional Linguistics. From an empirical point of view, we offer a qualitative analysis of lists based on data from two corpora of spoken Italian: the LIP corpus (De Mauro et al. 1993) and the KIParla corpus (Mauri et al. 2019a). In particular, we discuss a case study on the use of the Italian discourse marker insomma within list constructions: while it serves as a reformulation marker in most of its uses, insomma also proves to be used (more marginally) as a category introducer within category-building lists. Our findings provide useful insight to ultimately bridge the gap between denotation lists as a reference-oriented phenomenon and other types of mechanisms that are relevant at the discourse level, including conversational repair

Il corpus KIParla

In questo articolo presentiamo le principali caratteristiche del CORPUS KIParla, una nuova risorsa per lo studio dell’italiano parlato, liberamente accessibile al sito www.kiparla.it. Il corpus è stato progettato per essere gratuitamente consultato attraverso l’interfaccia NoSketch Engine e per essere espanso nel tempo tramite l’aggiunta di nuovi moduli. Il corpus KIParla fornisce l’accesso a una vasta gamma di metadati che caratterizzano sia i partecipanti che le interazioni, utilizzabili come filtri di ricerca. Al momento il KIParla consiste di due moduli (KIP e ParlaTO), che permettono di effettuare ricerche sulla variazione diafasica, diatopica e diastratica dell’italiano contemporaneo. Parole chiave: corpus, italiano parlato, sociolinguistica