Abstract: Towards a New Definition of Manner through Italian Spontaneous Dialogues. Manner has been traditionally considered as a semantic prime expressing the way in which an action is performed. In previous studies, it has been treated as a category fulfilling a basically descriptive function, encoded by an inventory of lexical or morpho-syntactic items (such as verb roots or adverbial phrases). In this paper, we propose a functional and corpus-driven definition of this notion. We present an annotation scheme of Manner constructions and we show how we applied it to 40 spontaneous Italian dialogues from the VOLIP corpus. The analysis of Manner constructions in spoken interactional data shows that, far from being a static descriptive notion, Manner can be regarded as an interactive, gradable category, co-constructed by speakers.

Keywords: Manner, corpus-driven analysis, spoken dialogues, co-construction of meaning