A corpus of spontaneous route descriptions was collected from 8 speakers (5 males and 3 females). The corpus was labelled according to the ToBI standard and a discourse analysis was completed. Four discourse tour acts were identified and these were found to occur mainly in non-embedded linear sequences. In general, the intonation of each route description was characterised by a single intonational phrase containing many intermediate phrases. There was a tendency for boundaries between tour acts and intermediate phrases to coincide, but there is usually more than one intermediate phrase to one tour act.
Cite as: Williams, S., Watson, C.I. (1999) A profile of the discourse and intonational structures of route descriptions. Proc. 6th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology (Eurospeech 1999), 1659-1662, doi: 10.21437/Eurospeech.1999-377
@inproceedings{williams99_eurospeech,
author={Sandra Williams and Catherine I. Watson},
title={{A profile of the discourse and intonational structures of route descriptions}},
year=1999,
booktitle={Proc. 6th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology (Eurospeech 1999)},
pages={1659--1662},
doi={10.21437/Eurospeech.1999-377}
}