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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. 309–326

Chapter 1
Segmentation and analysis of the two English excerpts

The Brazilian team proposal

| Federal University of Minas Gerais, CNPq, FAPEMIG
| State University of Campinas, Institute for Language Studies, CNPq
| Federal University of Minas Gerais, CAPES
| Unifacvest

This paper has a tripartite focus: (1) to establish the best segmentation for two American English texts according to inter-rater agreement measurements. By doing this, we differentiate the behavior of experts and non-experts annotators. The experts’ annotation constitute the basis for the analysis; (2) to capture, measure, and analyze the phonetic features that correlate with boundaries, as they are marked by the expert annotators; (3) to informationally annotate prosodic units according to the Language into Act Theory, and analyze their corresponding information structure: in order to do this, we make and justify decisions in marking the reference units and assigning informational value to prosodic units; additionally we further discuss some cases of major disagreements.

Keywords: speech segmentation, boundaries, phonetic features, inter-rater agreement, information structure annotation
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Inter-rater agreement in the segmentation
  • 3.Phonetic measurements
  • 4.Reference unit and IUs: A functional analysis
    • 4.1The reference unit
    • 4.2Intonation units and information pattern
  • 5.Final remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 18 June 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.94.10ras
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