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Cue words and the topic structure of spoken discourse: The case of Swedish men 'but'

Horne, Merle LU orcid ; Hansson, Petra ; Bruce, Gösta LU ; Frid, Johan LU orcid and Filipsson, Marcus (2001) In Journal of Pragmatics 33(7). p.1061-1081
Abstract
The Swedish cue word men ‘but’ can mark the boundary between both different topic units as well as topic-internal units in spontaneous speech. The goal of this study is to see if these two functions of men can be distinguished on the basis of their local prosodic correlates and co-occurring lexical items. Men-tokens in spontaneous narrations were labelled as to their function, first using text-only data. The ‘strong’ tokens (categorized identically by all labellers) were subsequently seen to be clearly differentiated into two classes on the basis of related prosodic parameters and co-occurring lexical items. This distinction was, however, not found for the corresponding ‘weak’ tokens which were subsequently relabelled using both text and... (More)
The Swedish cue word men ‘but’ can mark the boundary between both different topic units as well as topic-internal units in spontaneous speech. The goal of this study is to see if these two functions of men can be distinguished on the basis of their local prosodic correlates and co-occurring lexical items. Men-tokens in spontaneous narrations were labelled as to their function, first using text-only data. The ‘strong’ tokens (categorized identically by all labellers) were subsequently seen to be clearly differentiated into two classes on the basis of related prosodic parameters and co-occurring lexical items. This distinction was, however, not found for the corresponding ‘weak’ tokens which were subsequently relabelled using both text and speech nor for the data-base as a whole. A test using a neural network trained using strong tokens was seen to be able to correctly categorize 90% of the strong men-tokens as to their associated boundary-type (topic-shift vs. topic-internal). The results show that cue words along with their prosodic correlates and co-occurring lexical items constitute a constellation of important information for understanding how segmentation of spoken discourse is produced and understood. (Less)
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author
; ; ; and
organization
publishing date
type
Contribution to journal
publication status
published
subject
keywords
Cue word, Discourse marker, Prosody, Spoken discourse, Topic structure, Speech recognition, Swedish
in
Journal of Pragmatics
volume
33
issue
7
pages
1061 - 1081
publisher
Elsevier
external identifiers
  • scopus:0035402184
ISSN
0378-2166
DOI
10.1016/S0378-2166(00)00044-8
project
The role of function words in spontaneous speech processing
language
English
LU publication?
yes
additional info
The information about affiliations in this record was updated in December 2015. The record was previously connected to the following departments: Linguistics and Phonetics (015010003)
id
bfb25cd7-9e9f-4a0d-a267-3e48978bf8f0 (old id 134737)
date added to LUP
2016-04-01 12:25:38
date last changed
2023-11-12 00:30:42
@article{bfb25cd7-9e9f-4a0d-a267-3e48978bf8f0,
  abstract     = {{The Swedish cue word men ‘but’ can mark the boundary between both different topic units as well as topic-internal units in spontaneous speech. The goal of this study is to see if these two functions of men can be distinguished on the basis of their local prosodic correlates and co-occurring lexical items. Men-tokens in spontaneous narrations were labelled as to their function, first using text-only data. The ‘strong’ tokens (categorized identically by all labellers) were subsequently seen to be clearly differentiated into two classes on the basis of related prosodic parameters and co-occurring lexical items. This distinction was, however, not found for the corresponding ‘weak’ tokens which were subsequently relabelled using both text and speech nor for the data-base as a whole. A test using a neural network trained using strong tokens was seen to be able to correctly categorize 90% of the strong men-tokens as to their associated boundary-type (topic-shift vs. topic-internal). The results show that cue words along with their prosodic correlates and co-occurring lexical items constitute a constellation of important information for understanding how segmentation of spoken discourse is produced and understood.}},
  author       = {{Horne, Merle and Hansson, Petra and Bruce, Gösta and Frid, Johan and Filipsson, Marcus}},
  issn         = {{0378-2166}},
  keywords     = {{Cue word; Discourse marker; Prosody; Spoken discourse; Topic structure; Speech recognition; Swedish}},
  language     = {{eng}},
  number       = {{7}},
  pages        = {{1061--1081}},
  publisher    = {{Elsevier}},
  series       = {{Journal of Pragmatics}},
  title        = {{Cue words and the topic structure of spoken discourse: The case of Swedish men 'but'}},
  url          = {{http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0378-2166(00)00044-8}},
  doi          = {{10.1016/S0378-2166(00)00044-8}},
  volume       = {{33}},
  year         = {{2001}},
}