Teaching Italian language online. (Technologies and linguistic strategies for English-speaking people)

During the Italian didactics' courses for teachers, the intonation is one of the most important topics that are taken in study of the linguistics studies, after the linguistic education science⁴⁴. This is due to the importance of second language courses for students being held in the same country where the language is officially spoken. So, the student has to be active to get all the Italian features, from the grammar culture to the idioms and so on. In fact, every language, beyond having its own phonetic system, also possesses other parameters that make it unique. One of them is intonation, which is the study of how a sentence is enunciated in order to question or answer. In other words, intonation is a prosody trait that comprehends a set of acoustic phenomena that indicate the beginning and the end of greater syntactic unities and the speaker’s pragmatic intention. The "syntactic unit” is linked to a sentence or a single word, while "speaker pragmatic intention” is the most important action that is concerned with the practical intention of the speaker.
In the Italian language, the question is graphically represented by the question mark, and the oral tone of the question is ascending. This means that in the Italian language, the tone, or the way the speaker underlines the intention, is focused on the end of the sentence. This makes understand that a person is asking a question during oral communication. As it is possible to see in the examples in red, B, D and G graphically possess the question mark, but at the moment in which the speaker is going to reproduce the sentence, or the syntactic unit, he must put the focus on the last part orally.

In conclusion, both three syntactic units, the words close to the question point, “chiami”, “sei” and “tu” are the informations that the speaker is asking for. In fact, in the B sentence, the speaker would like to know the name of the person who is talking with; the same question is valid for the D sentence, where the element “sei”, in this case, stands for the nationality. In G sentence, from a semantic point of view, it is possible to observe the answer in which the other speaker asks the same questions as the first speaker, while regarding the prosody point of view, the intonation “tu” stands as the main point of the question of where the intonation is ascendant. Ascendant means that the voice’s tone goes up at the end of the syntactic unit. This tone is also called the “rising tone.” Here below, it is possible to get a short look of the topic explained and a personal graphic representation of the question intonation in Italian:
B) “Come ti chiami?”, “what is your name?”: focus on the name.
D) “Di dove sei?”, “where are you from?”: focus on the country where the second speaker comes from.
G) “E tu?”, “and you?”: the second speaker asks back the same questions.

The other case, the C syntactic unit, concerns a sentence and a word that don’t have the question point. In fact, the syntactic units in this case are represented by a stop point. In the Italian language, the syntactic unit with this kind of punctuation has another intonation. The intonation line represented below has the neuter tone name definition, which means that the syntactic unit doesn’t have any rising or descendant voice tones.
C) “Piacere”, “nice to meet you”, a single word. The synonym “piacere mio”, a sentence.


_{44 See chapter 1.}