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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. 257–284

Chapter 8
Narrative discourse segmentation in clinical linguistics

| National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia
| National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia

This chapter deals with segmentation, definition of basic units and annotation of the first corpus of Russian narratives by individuals with brain damage – people with aphasia and right hemisphere damage – and neurologically healthy speakers. We show that parameters such as pause length and intonation contours cannot be used for segmentation of impaired speech. Instead, they use syntactic criteria for the identification of the basic, or – as they are called in this paper – elementary discourse units (EDUs). The Russian CliPS (Clinical Pear Stories) corpus contains multi-layer annotation of audio- and video-recordings, performed on micro- and macro-linguistic level, and can be used as a source for qualitative and quantitative research on various aspects of speech in aphasia and right hemisphere damage.

Keywords: discourse segmentation, corpus annotation, aphasic discourse, aphasia, Pear stories retellings, Russian
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Narrative discourse and segmentation
    • 1.2Challenges for segmentation of pathological speech
  • 2.Russian CliPS corpus
    • 2.1Speakers
    • 2.2Procedure
    • 2.3Annotation
  • 3.Segmentation in the Russian CliPS
    • 3.1Basic speech units
      • 3.1.1Segmentation criteria
      • 3.1.2Basic unit size
    • 3.2Macrolevel segmentation
      • 3.2.1Interaction markers
      • 3.2.2Scenes
      • 3.2.3Segmentation criteria
      • 3.2.4Analysis
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 18 June 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.94.08ber
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