Julie Beliao

Characterizing Speech Genres through the Relation between Prosody and Macrosyntax

The role of prosody and syntax in identifying basic discourse units is a recurring issue in studies of spoken language. This paper focuses on the highest-level units of macrosyntactic and prosodic structures, namely illocutionary units (IUs) and intonational periods (IPes). The study first presents macrosyntactic illocutionary units and intonational periods, and then investigates how they interact, in particular the synchronization and the relative number of their boundaries, in a corpus of spoken French. The analysis shows that it is possible to identify different types of synchronizations (total, partial, or absent) and their relative proportions, and that the combinations of these units vary according to the subgenres of the studied corpus. The results are interpreted from a functional point of view as an interaction between intonosyntax and discourse genres. It is argued that the simple features proposed here may be interesting and easily handleable and reproducible for the study of other spoken language corpora, whatever the language.