FRANCO
PAULETTO

I am a teacher of Italian as a foreign language and a researcher in the field of Interactional Linguistics and Conversation Analysis. My research focuses on spoken and embodied interaction in both ordinary and institutional settings: for this purpose, I use the theory and method of Conversation Analysis (CA). In CA the machineries that organize talk-in-interaction are analyzed empirically, producing action-based accounts of what participants observably do. I am particularly interested in the use of pragmatic particles - small words such as 'oh', 'well', 'right' or 'look' - in spontaneous conversations taking place in regional Italian and in the Italo-Romance variety spoken in central-northern Veneto ('Trevigiano' or 'Trevixàn' [trevi'zaŋ]). Pragmatic particles (also known as 'discourse markers' in English or 'segnali discorsivi' in Italian) are a very heterogeneous set of linguistic objects belonging to different word classes such as verbs, adverbs, conjunctions, and interjections. The aim of my research is not so much to catalog the discrete 'functions' of these linguistic resources, as it is to expose the social actions that speakers carry out through the use of these small words in everyday conversation. I am currently a member of the MarDisCo research group (Labex Aslan, Université de Lyon) led by Heike Baldauf-Quilliatre (Laboratoire ICAR, Université de Lyon) and Biagio Ursi (Université d'Orléans). MarDisCo ("Les marqueurs du discours de l’italien et du français dans une perspective comparée et appliquée") aims to study the conversational uses of pragmatic particles in French and Italian in interaction. Anchored in a double perspective, descriptive and applied, the purpose of this project is to produce original studies in interactional linguistics and to contribute to the reflection on the use of spoken corpora, by proposing methods and tools for the creation of resources for foreign language teaching.