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. 367–382

The Moscow approach to local discourse structure

An application to English

| Institute of Linguistics RAS and Lomonosov Moscow State University
| Russian State University for the Humanities
| Russian State University for the Humanities
This chapter is an exploratory study in which we apply an approach to local discourse structure and prosody, developed for spoken Russian, to English talk. A key conceptual element of our approach is the notion of elementary discourse unit (EDU). EDUs are identified on the basis of prosodic criteria and demonstrate substantial correspondence to clauses. A range of structural, prosodic and discourse-semantic phenomena are reviewed, including pausing, discourse accent, phase, and spoken sentence. The analysis begins with those phenomena that are characteristic of both monologic and multi-party discourse, and proceeds with those features that are only found in interactional exchange. The Russian-oriented system of discourse transcription and analysis turns out to be generally applicable to the English evidence.
Keywords: spoken discourse, discourse transcription, local discourse structure, elementary discourse unit, prosody, pause, discourse accent, phase, spoken sentence
Published online: 18 June 2020
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.94.15kib
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