"What is the best way to analyze spontaneous spoken language? In their search for the basic units of spoken language the authors of this volume opt for a corpus-driven approach. They share a strong conviction that prosodic structure is essential for the study of spoken discourse and each bring their own theoretical and practical experience to the table. In the first part of the book they segment spoken material from a range of different languages (Russian, Hebrew, Central Pomo (an indigenous language from California), French, Japanese, Italian, and Brazilian Portuguese). In the second part of the book each author analyzes the same two spoken English samples, but looking at them from different perspectives, using different methods of analysis as reflected in their respective analyses in Part I. This approach allows for common tendencies of segmentation to emerge, both prosodic and segmental"--.

• In Search of Basic Units of Spoken Language
• Editorial page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• In memory of Wallace Chafe
• Table of contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: In search of a basic unit of spoken language: Segmenting speech
  • 1. Why do we need to segment speech?
  • 2. How do we segment speech?
  • 3. How do we use intonation units?
  • 4. The content of this book
  • References
• Part I
• Chapter 1. Russian spoken discourse: Local structure and prosody
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. General organization of vocal discourse
  • 3. Elementary discourse units
    • 3.1 Identification
    • 3.2 EDUs and clauses
  • 4. Accents, pitch, and phase
  • 5. Illocution-final EDUs
    • 5.1 Statement and question
    • 5.2 Directive
    • 5.3 Semi-statement
    • 5.4 Vocative
    • 5.5 Exclamation
  • 6. Illocution-non-final EDUs
    • 6.1 Default incompleteness: Rising pitch accent
    • 6.2 Default incompleteness: Falling pitch accent plus a subsequent rise
    • 6.3 Default incompleteness: Falling pitch accent
    • 6.4 Default incompleteness combined with a local illocutionary semantics
    • 6.5 Elucidation
    • 6.6 Inexhaustiveness
  • 7. Disfluencies
  • 8. Other phenomena
  • 9. Conclusion: Vocal channels and their interaction with non-vocal channels
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
  • Appendix A. Transcription conventions
  • Appendix B. A fragment from the Russian Pear Chats and Stories corpus (Pears04), scores transcript
• Chapter 2. The basic unit of spoken language and the interfaces between prosody, discourse and syntax: A view from spontaneous spoken Hebrew
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Units of spoken language: Definitions and terminology
    • 2.1 Prosodic and information (discourse) units
    • 2.2 Syntax: The clause
  • 3. In search of the basic unit of spoken language
    • 3.1 The interface between prosodic, information (discourse), and syntactic units
    • 3.2 Hypotheses
    • 3.3 One single utterance consists of a single clause
    • 3.4 Utterances with no syntactic contents
    • 3.5 Expanded configurations
    • 3.6 Interim conclusions
    • 3.7 Utterances ending in minor boundaries and Utts continuing after major boundaries
  • 4. Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
• Chapter 3. Prosody and the organization of information in Central Pomo, a California indigenous language
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Intonation Units and the packaging of information
  • 3. Sentence boundaries
  • 4. Subjects, objects, and topicalization
  • 5. Clause linking
  • 6. Conclusion
  • Abbreviations
  • References
• Chapter 4. Syntactic and prosodic segmentation in spoken French
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Linguistic framework
    • 2.1 From text units to discourse units
    • 2.2 The syntactic subcomponent
    • 2.3 Prosodic component
    • 2.4 The interface rules between the formal components
  • 3. Descriptive issues
    • 3.1 Simple utterances: Nuclei
    • 3.2 Compound utterances: Nucleus + Satellite
    • 3.3 Configurations as extended discourse patterns: Grouping
    • 3.4 Ungrouping: Epexegesis
    • 3.5 Some remarkable configurations in monologue
  • 4. Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
• Chapter 5. Design and annotation of two-level utterance units in Japanese
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Analysis of the interrelationships among four utterance-unit types
    • 2.1 Data
    • 2.2 Annotation
    • 2.3 Statistical analysis
    • 2.4 Results
  • 3. Proposal of a two-level annotation scheme
  • 4. Characteristics of the proposed utterance-units
    • 4.1 Unit duration and syntactic property
    • 4.2 Hearers’ responses
  • 5. Extensions to the scheme
    • 5.1 Interactional disjuncture
    • 5.2 Mismatch between short and long utterance-unit boundaries
    • 5.3 Revised scheme
  • 6. Concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
• Chapter 6. The pragmatic analysis of speech and its illocutionary classification according to the language into Act Theory
  • 1. Premises
    • 1.1 Introduction to language into Act Theory
    • 1.2 The corpus-based analysis of spontaneous speech
    • 1.3 The empirical research
  • 2. Some examples of spontaneous speech
    • 2.1 A single turn
    • 2.2 A negotiation
    • 2.3 An interactive multi-dialogue
    • 2.4 A family conversation
  • 3. The L-AcT classification system
    • 3.1 Background
    • 3.2 Pragmatic features of identification
    • 3.3 Working procedure for the identification of an illocutionary type in the corpus
  • 4. Prosodic research
    • 4.1 Description of the prosodic nucleus
    • 4.2 The distinction between order and instruction
  • 5. A first classification
    • 5.1 A general overview
    • 5.2 The assertive class and its sub-classes
    • 5.3 Examples of the self-conclusion type from the weak assertion sub-class
    • 5.4 Examples of the assertion taken for granted type belonging to the weak assertion sub-class
    • 5.5 Examples of the ascertainment type in the strong assertion sub-class
    • 5.6 Examples of the assertion of evidence type from the strong assertion sub-class
  • 6. Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
  • Appendix. Illocutionary classes, sub-classes and types
• Chapter 7. Illocution as a unit of reference for spontaneous speech: An account of insubordinated adverbial clauses in Brazilian Portuguese
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Subordination and insubordination
  • 3. The analysis of spontaneous speech
    • 3.1 The segmentation of speech
    • 3.2 Speech segmentation and illocution
    • 3.3 Speech segmentation and information units (IUs)
  • 4. The corpus
  • 5. Data analysis
    • 5.1 Types of adverbial conjunctions
    • 5.2 Non-canonical characteristics of adverbial clauses in spoken bp
    • 5.3 Distribution of adverbial subordinators/adverbial clauses
  • 6. Final remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • Abbreviations
  • C-ORAL notation and symbols list
  • References
• Chapter 8. Narrative discourse segmentation in clinical linguistics
  • 1. Introduction
    • 1.1 Narrative discourse and segmentation
    • 1.2 Challenges for segmentation of pathological speech
  • 2. Russian CliPS corpus
    • 2.1 Speakers
    • 2.2 Procedure
    • 2.3 Annotation
  • 3. Segmentation in the Russian CliPS
    • 3.1 Basic speech units
    • 3.2 Macrolevel segmentation
  • 4. Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
• Chapter 9. Cross-linguistic comparison of automatic detection of speech breaks in read and narrated speech in four languages
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Methodology
    • 2.1 Corpus
    • 2.2 The SalienceDetector script
  • 3. Results
    • 3.1 Testing with English spontaneous speech
  • 4. Conclusions
  • References
• Part II
• Same texts, different approaches to segmentation: An introduction to the second part of the volume
  • 1. Introductory notes to the second part of the volume
  • 2. The analyzed texts
• Chapter 1. Segmentation and analysis of the two English excerpts: The Brazilian team proposal
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Inter-rater agreement in the segmentation
  • 3. Phonetic measurements
  • 4. Reference unit and IUs: A functional analysis
    • 4.1 The reference unit
    • 4.2 Intonation units and information pattern
  • 5. Final remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
  • Appendix A. Excerpt: Hearts
  • Appendix B. Excerpt: Navy
• Chapter 2. Analysis of two English spontaneous speech examples with the dependency incremental prosodic structure model
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. The dependency incremental prosodic structure
  • 3. Navy excerpt
  • 4. Hearts excerpt
  • Conclusion
  • References
• Chapter 3. Applying criteria of spontaneous Hebrew speech segmentation to English
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Prosody: Segmentation and annotation
  • 3. Discourse annotation
  • 4. Syntactic annotation
  • 5. Comments on individual units
    • 5.1 Hearts
    • 5.2 Navy
  • 6. Conclusion
  • References
  • Appendix A. Transcription conventions and abbreviations
  • Appendix B. Hearts
  • Appendix C. Navy
• Chapter 4. Basic units of speech segmentation
  • References
  • Appendix. Tagset
• Chapter 5. Segmentation of the English texts Navy and Hearts with SUU and LUU
  • 1. Introduction: Two types of utterance units
  • 2. Some observations on the monologue Navy
  • 3. Some observations on the dialogue Hearts
  • 4. Discussion
  • 5. Concluding remarks
  • References
  • Appendix. Tagset
• Chapter 6. The Moscow approach to local discourse structure: An application to English
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Basics
  • 3. More complex instances
  • 4. Challenges of multi-party discourse
  • 5. Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
  • Appendix A. Transcription conventions
  • Appendix B. Transcript of Navy
  • Appendix C. Transcript of Hearts
• Chapter 7. Some notes on the Hearts and Navy excerpts according to language into act theory
  • 1. Premises
  • 2. The tagged transcription according to L-AcT
  • 3. The pragmatic analysis
  • 4. The organization of information
  • 5. L-AcT analysis beyond pragmatics
  • References
  • Appendix A.
  • Appendix B.
  • Appendix C.
  • Appendix D.
  • Appendix E.
  • Appendix F.
• Chapter 8. Comparing annotations for the prosodic segmentation of spontaneous speech: Focus on reference units
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Comparing the different theoretical perspectives
    • 2.1 Preliminary remarks
    • 2.2 The segmentation of the speech flow into discrete units
    • 2.3 The relation between prosody and syntax
    • 2.4 The nature of the reference units for spoken speech
  • 3. The SLAC database
    • 3.1 Web interface
    • 3.2 The Unified Tagset
  • 4. Overall agreement
    • 4.1 Starting data and preliminary choices
    • 4.2 Interpreting the data
    • 4.3 Standard agreement
  • 5. Pairwise agreement
    • 5.1 ANY: Agreement on prosodic break perception
    • 5.2 OTB: Agreement on terminal break
    • 5.3 Strong and weak disagreement
    • 5.4 Weighted agreement
  • 6. Final remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
  • Appendix. The Unified Tagset
• Index