Chapter published in:
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
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.94.05mar
References
AMI Project
(2005) Guidelines for dialogue act and addressee annotation (Version 1.0).Google Scholar
Beckman, M., & Ayers, G.
(1994) Guidelines for ToBI labeling. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University.Google Scholar
Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S., & Finegan, E.
(1999) The Longman grammar of spoken and written English. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Chafe, W. L.
(1980) The deployment of consciousness in the construction of narrative. In W. L. Chafe (Ed.), The pear stories: Cognitive, cultural, and linguistic aspects of narrative production (pp. 353–387). Norwood, NJ: Ablex.Google Scholar
(1987) Cognitive constraints on information flow. In R. S. Tomlin (Ed.), Coherence and grounding in discourse (pp. 21–51). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(1994) Discourse, consciousness, and time: The flow and displacement of conscious experience in speaking and writing. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Clancy, P. M., Thompson, S. A., Suzuki, R., & Tao, H.
(1996) The conversational use of reactive tokens in English, Japanese, and Mandarin. Journal of Pragmatics, 26, 355–387. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Den, Y., & Enomoto, M.
(2007) A scientific approach to conversational informatics: Description, analysis, and modeling of human conversation. In N. T. (Ed.), Conversational informatics: An engineering approach (pp. 307–330). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Den, Y., Koiso, H., Maruyama, T., Maekawa, K., Takanashi, K., Enomoto, M., & Yoshida, N.
(2010) Two-level annotation of utterance-units in Japanese dialogs: An empirically emerged scheme. In Proceedings of the 7th international conference on language resources and evaluation (LREC 2010) (pp. 2103–2110). Valletta, Malta.Google Scholar
Den, Y., Yoshida, N., Takanashi, K., & Koiso, H.
(2011) Annotation of Japanese response tokens and preliminary analysis on their distribution in three-party conversations. In Proceedings of the 14th Oriental COCOSDA (O-COCOSDA 2011) (pp. 168–173). Hsinchu, Taiwan.Google Scholar
Du Bois, J. W., Shuetze-Coburn, S., Cumming, S., & Paolino, D.
(1993) Outline of discourse transcription. In J. A. Edwards & M. D. Lampert (Eds.), Talking data: Transcription and coding in discourse research (pp. 45–89). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Ford, C. E., & Thompson, S. A.
(1996) Interactional units in conversation: Syntactic, intonational, and pragmatic resources for the management of turns. In E. Ochs, E. A. Schegloff, & S. A. Thompson (Eds.), Interaction and grammar (pp. 134–184). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Gardner, R.
(2001) When listeners talk. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Iwasaki, S.
(1993) The structure of the intonation unit in Japanese. In S. Choi (Ed.), Japanese/Korean linguistics (Vol. 3, pp. 39–53). Stanford, CA: CSLI.Google Scholar
Iwasaki, S., & Ono, T.
(2002) “Sentence” in spontaneous spoken Japanese discourse. In J. Bybee, & M. Noonan (Eds.), Complex sentences in grammar and discourse: Essays in honor of Sandra A. Thompson (pp. 175–202). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Koiso, H., Den, Y., Iseki, Y., Kashino, W., Kawabata, Y., Nishikawa, K., Tanaka, Y., & Usuda, Y.
(2018) Construction of the corpus of everyday Japanese conversation: An interim report. In Proceedings of the 11th international conference on language resources and evaluation (LREC 2018) (pp. 4259–4264). Miyazaki, Japan.Google Scholar
Koiso, H., Horiuchi, Y., Tutiya, S., Ichikawa, A., & Den, Y.
(1998) An analysis of turn-taking and backchannels based on prosodic and syntactic features in Japanese Map Task dialogs. Language and Speech, 41, 295–321. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Maekawa, K.
(2003) Corpus of spontaneous Japanese: Its design and evaluation. In Proceedings of ISCA and IEEE workshop on spontaneous speech processing and recognition (SSPR 2003) (pp. 7–12). Tokyo.Google Scholar
Maekawa, K., Kikuchi, H., Igarashi, Y., & Venditti, J. J.
(2002) X-JToBI: An extended J ToBI for spontaneous speech. In Proceedings of the 7th international conference on spoken language processing (INTERSPEECH 2002) (pp. 1545–1548). Denver, CO.Google Scholar
Maruyama, T., Horn, S. W., Russell, K. L., & Frellesvig, B.
(2017) On the multiple clause linkage structure of Japanese: A corpus-based study. In N. Kazashi & M. Mariotti (Eds.), New steps in Japanese studies: Kobe university joint research (pp. 131–154). Venice: Ca’ Foscari.Google Scholar
Maruyama, T., Takanashi, K., & Yoshida, N.
(2010) An annotation scheme for syntactic unit in Japanese dialog. In Proceedings of DiSS-LPSS joint workshop 2010: The 5th workshop on disfluency in spontaneous speech, and the 2nd international symposium on linguistic patterns in spontaneous speech (pp. 51–54). Tokyo.Google Scholar
Meteer, M., Taylor, A., MacIntyre, R., & Iyer, R.
(1995) Dysfluency annotation stylebook for the switchboard corpus. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania.Google Scholar
Nakagawa, N., & Den, Y.
(2012) Annotation of anaphoric relations and topic continuity in Japanese conversation. In Proceedings of the 8th international conference on language resources and evaluation (LREC 2012) (pp. 179–186). Istanbul, Turkey.Google Scholar
Sacks, H., Schegloff, E. A., & Jefferson, G.
(1974) A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation. Language, 50, 696–735. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Schegloff, E. A.
(1987) Recycled turn beginnings: A precise repair mechanism in conversation’s turn-taking organization. In G. Button & J. R. E. Lee (Eds.), Talk and social organisation (pp. 70–85). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.Google Scholar
(1996) Turn organization: One intersection of grammar and interaction. In E. Ochs, E. A. Schegloff, & S. A. Thompson (Eds.), Interaction and grammar (pp. 52–133). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Takanashi, K., Maruyama, T., Uchimoto, K., & Isahara, H.
(2003) Identification of “sentences” in spontaneous Japanese – Detection and modification of clause boundaries –. In Proceedings of ISCA and IEEE workshop on spontaneous speech processing and recognition (SSPR 2003) (pp. 183–186). Tokyo.Google Scholar
Tanaka, H.
(1999) Turn-taking in Japanese conversation: A study in grammar and interaction. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Venditti, J. J.
(1994) Japanese ToBI labelling guidelines, 50. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University.Google Scholar

audio

Cited by

Cited by 2 other publications

Kibrik, Andrej A., Nikolay A. Korotaev & Vera I. Podlesskaya
2020.  In In Search of Basic Units of Spoken Language [Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 94], ► pp. 35 ff. Crossref logo
Maruyama, Takehiko
2020.  In In Search of Basic Units of Spoken Language [Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 94], ► pp. 359 ff. Crossref logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 28 december 2021. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.