Analisi di campioni di continuative nei dialetti e lingue regionali d’Italia: più possibilità intonative?

This study concerns the intonational analysis of continuatives, those intonational units employed by the speaker to maintain attention on the unfinished utterance. Although prosodic studies have shown them to be independent of other intonations, such as assertive or interrogative intonations (Delattre 1966; Canepari 1999), the results discussed (Cruttenden 1980) often return one or a few possible patterns that do not seem to cover a wider intonational variation (Delattre 1961). On the basis of these premises, we tried to investigate what happens in some dialectal varieties of Italy starting from a corpus of read speech, which brought to group some of the most recurrent intonational patterns used in the elicitation of continuous segments.