Intonazione e significato: l'esempio dell'italiano regionale di Bergamo

In this paper we present a selection of preliminary results of our research project “Intonation and Meaning”, in which we compare recurrent intonation contours in German and Italian regional varieties. We apply the method of German Interactional Prosody Research (Interaktionale Prosodieforschung), which in turn is based on Conversation Analysis, to a sample of selfcollected empirical data. Our aim is to show the value of intonation as a resource to contextualize speech activities and to point out form-function relationships between intonation patterns and speech act types. In this respect, we observe the usage of intonation contours with rising accent (L*H) and with falling accent (H*L) in the utterance of question activities, and provide evidence for the fact that the latter represent a distinctive type of questions with epistemic presupposition, whereas L*H correlates rather with default, modally unmarked questions.