It is a basic premise of conversation analysis that interactions
are both structurally organized and contextually oriented (Heritage
1984), and a primary goal of the analysis is elucidating these
structures and determining how they are interrelated. A working model
of conversational structure must minimally account for a
The focus of the present study is an examination of the correlation between such shifts and changes in the prosodic structure of a conversation. Intonation has been studied from two essentially different views: the acoustic approach measures intonation in terms of changes in fundamental frequency (F0), while the perceptual approach relies on auditory perception, and intonation can be defined in terms of pitch. Changes in F0 can be tracked through conversation with reference to a declination unit (DU), a term which refers to the downdrift phenomenon of F0 over the course of speech (Cohen and 't Hart 1967; see Ladd (1993) for discussion and refinement). By contrast, the perceptual approach sees changes in the intonational contour with respect to the intonation unit (IU) (Chafe 1987). Instrumental measurements for this study are done on the Computerized Speech Lab by Kay Elemetrics; the analysis is based on a corpus of spontaneous Russian conversations recorded in St. Peterburg.
A preliminary analysis suggests the following results: (1) There is a high correlation between an information unit and an IU, and a correlation between an information unit and syntactic completion; (2) The correlation between DUs and IUs is not absolute: in Russian conversation, a DU often includes more than one IU, but there is a strong tendency for the boundary of a DU to match that of an IU (a finding which matches that of English; see Schuetze-Coburn et al 1991); (3) There is a high coincidence between the boundaries of turns, DUs, and IUs, sometimes correlated with a pause. Significantly, the pause alone does not signal turn completion without corresponding prosodic cues, and even relatively long pauses (such as 2.21 seconds in the following example) may be treated as turn-internal:
(1) ja pytalas' uexat' v&chachek;era (2.21 sec) I tried to.leave yesterday Hz 208 217-294 (2) dumaju ja ego esli pojmaju I.think I him if I.catch Hz 227-269 312 345 (3) ja ego razorvu voob&shachek;&chachek;e na &chachek;asti I him rip in.general to pieces Hz 270 170 175
This example is divided into one IU per line; each IU corresponds
roughly to one syntactic clause (two clauses/IUs with the
parenthetical verb
Reference
Chafe, W. 1987.
Cohen, A. and J. 't Hart. 1967.
Heritage, J. 1984.
Ladd, D. R. 1993. the
Baseline
in Modelling Intonation.
Schuetze-Coburn, S., M. Shapley and
E.G. Weber. 1991.