| Summary: | This article relies on the comparison between speech and writing, aiming to show the necessity of a new approach in methodology and in analytical categories in order for spontaneous speech structure to be understood. Through examples from corpora of natural context texts, some aspects related to the status of speech and writing are discussed; afterwards the main pragmatic differences between the two modalities of language are examined, and are attributed to clear consequences of differences in medium and channel. A section dedicated to the function of prosody introduces a discussion of the different reference units in speech and writing and their different communicative status. Finally, we propose an innovative approach in order to study speech under an empirical perspective, with some observations on the characteristics of new technologies applied to language use.
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