Parlato accademico e general extenders: uno studio sul contesto delle lezioni universitarie

Abstract

This paper aims to investigate the use of general extenders within a corpus of university lectures in Italian. The term general extenders refers to a class of expressions whose “primary function is the extension of the reference of the preceding nominal or verbal phrase, resulting in the creation of a relevant category in the given context” (Fiorentini 2018). Formally, they include both single lexical forms and broader phrases. Due to their formal and semantic features, expressions of this class can be considered part of a series of uses that lie on the continuum between lexicon and syntax. They play a fundamental role in the online construction and negotiation of meaning. Moreover, speakers may use them as strategies for vagueness or mitigation of an utterance. Most studies on general extenders in spoken Italian have been conducted mainly on informal speech productions. Their use, like other elements related especially to the discursive and pragmatic dimension of language, is highly sensitive to contextual and sociolinguistic variation. The corpus used for this study consists of university lectures in Italian held in Italy and university lectures in Italian abroad. The goal is to provide an overview of the use of general extenders in this area of academic discourse, proposing a comparison with informal spoken contexts already addressed in the scientific literature, and to highlight any differences between the two different lecture contexts present in the corpus.