Chapter 5
Design and annotation of two-level utterance units in Japanese
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.
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
-
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Cited by
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ICASSP 2022 - 2022 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP),
► pp. 8492 ff.

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