Discourse levels in spoken language

This study explores the role of parenthetical structures and reported speech in the organization of spontaneous spoken discourse, focusing on their functional and prosodic features. Building on the Language into Act Theory (L-AcT), the paper examines how the two discourse-levels work, interact, and contribute to the overall architecture of speech. Parentheticals, operating within an intra-enunciative plane, introduce secondary content that is prosodically marked by pitch lowering, boundary pauses, and reduced prominence. In contrast, reported speech introduces an external or fictive voice, establishing a meta-enunciative level often marked by a quotative frame and prosodic shift such as pitch increases or expanded pitch ranges. Despite their formal and functional differences, both phenomena exhibit complementary roles in structuring discourse and challenge the notion of a linear discourse model by revealing a stratified organization of speech, where utterances can be embedded, layered, and recontextualized in real time. Based on empirical data from a corpus-driven analysis, this study highlights the close relationship between prosody and discourse function, showing how speakers manage multiple communicative layers within a single interaction.