The paper introduces the IMPAQTS corpus of Italian political discourse, a multimodal corpus of around 2.65 million tokens including 1,500 speeches uttered by 150 prominent politicians spanning from 1946 to 2023. Covering the entire history of the Italian Republic, the collection exhibits a non-homogeneous consistency that progressively increases in quantity towards the present. The corpus is balanced according to textual and socio-linguistic criteria and includes different types of speeches. The sociolinguistic features of the speakers are carefully considered to ensure representation of Republican Italian politicians. For each speaker, the corpus contains 4 parliamentary speeches, 2 rallies, 1 party assembly, and 3 statements (in person or broadcasted). Parliamentary speeches therefore constitute the largest section of the corpus (40% of the total), enabling direct comparison with other types of political speeches. The collection procedure, including details relevant to the transcription protocols, and the processing pipeline are described. The corpus has been pragmatically annotated to include information about the implicitly conveyed questionable contents, paired with their explicit paraphrasis, providing the largest Italian collection of ecologic examples of linguistic implicit strategies. The adopted ontology of linguistic implicitness and the fine-grained annotation scheme are presented in detail.

Regularities in position and level of prosodic prominences associated to patterns of Information Structure are identified for some Italian varieties. The experiments' results suggest a possibly new structural hypothesis on the role and function of the main prominence in marking information patterns. (1) An abstract and merely structural, """"topologic"""" concept of Prominence location can be conceived of, as endowed with the function of demarcation between units, before their culmination and """"description"""". This may suffice to explain much of the process by which speakers interpret the IS of utterances in discourse. Further features, such as the specific intonational contours of the different IS units, may thus represent a certain amount of redundancy. (2) Real utterances do not always signal the distribution of Topic and Focus clearly. Acoustically, many remain underspecified in this respect. This is especially true for the distinction between Topic-Focus and Broad Focus, which indeed often has no serious effects on the progression of communicative dynamism in the subsequent discourse. (3) The consistency of such results with the law of least effort, and the very high percent of matching between perceptual evaluations and automatic measurement, seem to validate the used algorithm.