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In Search of Basic Units of Spoken Language: A corpus-driven approach
Edited by Shlomo Izre'el, Heliana Mello, Alessandro Panunzi and Tommaso Raso
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 94] 2020
► pp. 155–180

Chapter 5
Design and annotation of two-level utterance units in Japanese

| Senshu University / NINJAL
| Chiba University / NINJAL
| NINJAL

We introduce an annotation scheme of two-level utterance units in Japanese speech, thus identifying utterance units in two different levels, which are called “short utterance-unit” (SUU) and “long utterance-unit” (LUU). SUUs are divided by acoustic and prosodic boundaries, corresponding to Intonation Units (Chafe, 1994), considered as basic units of speakers’ planning. LUUs, on the other hand, correspond to Clausal Units (Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad, & Finegan, 1999), being divided by major syntactic breaks and/or communicative interactions. Those are basic units of syntactic chunks and/or participants’ interaction. We show a design of SUU and LUU consisting of prosodic, clausal and non-clausal units. Annotating SUU and LUU in 12 dialogs of two hours altogether, we examine their characteristics and distribution in the corpus.

Keywords: two-level utterance-units, short utterance-unit (SUU), long utterance-unit (LUU), acoustic and prosodic boundaries, syntactic breaks, communicative interactions, speaker’s planning, participants’ interaction
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Analysis of the interrelationships among four utterance-unit types
    • 2.1Data
    • 2.2Annotation
      • 2.2.1Inter-pausal units (IPUs)
      • 2.2.2Intonation units (IUs)
      • 2.2.3Clause units (CUs)
      • 2.2.4Pragmatic units (PUs)
    • 2.3Statistical analysis
    • 2.4Results
  • 3.Proposal of a two-level annotation scheme
  • 4.Characteristics of the proposed utterance-units
    • 4.1Unit duration and syntactic property
      • 4.1.1Purpose
      • 4.1.2Data
      • 4.1.3Results and discussion
    • 4.2Hearers’ responses
      • 4.2.1Purpose
      • 4.2.2Data and annotation
      • 4.2.3Results and discussion
  • 5.Extensions to the scheme
    • 5.1Interactional disjuncture
    • 5.2Mismatch between short and long utterance-unit boundaries
    • 5.3Revised scheme
  • 6.Concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • Note
  • Glossary
  • References
Published online: 18 June 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.94.05mar
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