What triggers reformulation? A study on spoken and written Italian

This paper deals with Italian reformulation markers and investigates how these markers can be triggered by different needs in spoken and written language. Broadly speaking, reformulation markers are a particular kind of discourse markers that allow the speaker to revisit a previous statement (Gülich & Kotschi 1983; 1987; Charolles & Coltier 1986; Roulet 1987; Rossari 1994; Del Saz Rubio & Fraser 2003). Reformulation markers create textual cohesion and are meant to avoid possible misunderstandings. Relying on the assumption that speech and writing differ in the degree of proximity between the producer of the language and the audience (Chafe & Danielewicz 1987; Koch & Österreicher 2001), we assume that reformulation may be triggered by different needs in the two modes. In writing, the distance between writer and reader is great: the writer has the time to plan his discourse and to formulate his thoughts clearly. In the writing process, the author acknowledges the absence of immediate feedbacks, so he constantly reformulates the text in order to fit to the possible reader’s needs. Nevertheless, readers only have access to the final version of a text (Halliday 1987), so when a reformulation is explicitly left in a text we may assume that it is a clue left by the speaker to alert the reader of a possible difficulty. On the other hand, in speech, the speaker is limited by online production constraints and receives immediate feedbacks on his utterances, so he can check if the intended meaning is correctly received. In this context, reformulation seems to be triggered by two distinct needs: the speaker’s ones and the addressee’s. “Speaker-oriented” reformulation is a response to the speaker’s need to correctly state what he has in mind and gain some time to plan the following bit of conversation (see example 1). As for “addressee-oriented” reformulation, it is performed to facilitate the understanding of a formulation that the speaker perceives as (possibly) problematic for the addressee (see example 2). (1) cioè la cosa funziona così cioè per servire che è un otorino se Antonio XYZ esce per esempio ne escono dieci [LIP] cioè the thing is cioè to serve that he is an otolaryngologist if Antonio XYZ goes out for example 10 of them go out (2) come avviene questo passaggio di informazione cioè come si trasforma un un'informazione da una lingua a un'altra [LIP] the way in which this information transmission happens cioè how an information is transformed from one language to another The present research is carried out on two corpora of Italian: the LIP corpus for spoken data and the CORIS/CODIS for written ones. The analysis is conducted following the guidelines of parametric analysis, as described in Degand & Bestgen (2004) and Spooren & Degand (2010). The reformulation markers that we take into account are cioè (that is, I mean), pervasive of both media of communication, ovvero (that is, or rather) typically found in written texts, and nel senso (that is, meaning that) commonly used in speech