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We present in this paper a quantitative and qualitative analysis of conversational styles through an inter and intra-linguistic study of different kinds of requests in Spanish and Italian dialogues, aiming to examine cultural characteristics in some way expressed by stylistic choices of speakers of two so closely related languages. We explore a corpus of Spanish and Italian task-oriented dialogues, in which two participants have to collaborate and cooperate to reach a common goal. Looking at the interactional dynamics oriented to obtain information to solve the task, we can observe that Spanish speakers do perform a wide variety of requests, asking for communicative contribution using yes-no questions, wh-questions and both specific and general questions. They verify interlocutor's availability to cooperate and require his/her attention on specific topics, but also only at the interactional level. On the other hand, Italian speakers tend to adopt mostly communicative strategies based on checks and yes-no questions, facing up to the task from their point of view. Comparing them with Spanish speakers, they seem to be more affected by the kind of task, so that the effort to solve it results to be decisive in establishing interactional patterns. We can see the features of two different styles, both determined by the effort to solve the task and by a good level of cooperation and involvement, even if each of them characterised by different modalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the preliminary results of a study focused on the definition of an inventory, of tonal patterns in Spanish dialogue speech using the GLISSANDO corpus, a corpus aimed for prosodic studies composed by a wide sample of formal and informal dialogues recorded by several speakers. The patterns described have been obtained automatically by applying the F0 contours stylisation, annotation and modeling procedure described in Garrido (2010) to a small sample of the corpus, four interactions (three formal and one informal) between two professional radio speakers, male and female (22 minutes and 53 seconds total duration). Results suggest that tonal patterns used in Spanish dialogues are, in general, the same as the ones used in reading style, although their uses and functions are probably slightly different as it was pointed out in previous studies. In any case, an in-depth analysis of the material collected in GLISSANDO will provide more details to confirm these initial conclusions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]