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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. 77–106

Chapter 2
The basic unit of spoken language and the interfaces between prosody, discourse and syntax

A View from spontaneous spoken Hebrew

| Tel Aviv University

Looking at spoken language as an integrative whole, where prosody, syntax and discourse features interplay as to conveying information, I will try to figure out the best methodology for its research by advocating that the best candidate to be regarded as the basic unit of spoken discourse is the utterance. Arguments brought will be mainly phonetic, phonological (prosodic), informational, and syntactic. In addition, arguments from pragmatics and conversation analysis will be mentioned.

Keywords: prosodic units, utterance, segmentation, syntax, clause, predicate, spoken language, Hebrew
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Units of spoken language: Definitions and terminology
    • 2.1Prosodic and information (discourse) units
      • 2.1.1Prosodic module (PM), segmental module (SM) and information module (IM)
      • 2.1.2Prosodic set (PS) and utterance (Utt) or information set
    • 2.2Syntax: The clause
  • 3.In search of the basic unit of spoken language
    • 3.1The interface between prosodic, information (discourse), and syntactic units
    • 3.2Hypotheses
    • 3.3One single utterance consists of a single clause
    • 3.4Utterances with no syntactic contents
    • 3.5Expanded configurations
      • 3.5.1Clause+
      • 3.5.2Clause clusters
    • 3.6Interim conclusions
    • 3.7Utterances ending in minor boundaries and Utts continuing after major boundaries
      • 3.7.1Utterances ending in minor boundaries
        • 3.7.1.1Isotony
        • 3.7.1.2Backchannels
        • 3.7.1.3Greetings and courtesy phrases
        • 3.7.1.4Suspended utterances
      • 3.7.2Major boundaries in mid-utterance position
        • 3.7.2.1Inserts
        • 3.7.2.2Split utterances
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 18 June 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.94.02izr
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