Cover not available

In:Spoken Corpora and Linguistic Studies
Edited by Tommaso Raso and Heliana Mello
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 61] 2014
► pp. 331–364

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload Book PDF
authorization required

The notion of sentence and other discourse units in corpus annotation

 | LLL, Université François Rabelais de Tours & CNRS
 | Modyco, Université de Paris Ouest Nanterre & CNRS
 | Modyco, Université de Paris Ouest Nanterre & CNRS
 | LPL, Université Aix-Marseille & CNRS
Published online: 14 November 2014
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.61.12pie
The notion of sentence – as it is defined in syntactic, semantic, graphic and prosodic terms – is not a suitable maximal unit for the prosodic and syntactic annotation of spoken corpora. Still, this notion is taken as a reference in many syntactic and prosodic annotation systems. We present here the modular approach we adopted for the annotation of the Rhapsodie corpus of spoken French, which led us to distinguish three types of elementary units operating in discourse (government units, illocutionary units, and intonational periods) and to annotate them separately. We describe the types of interactions identified among these various levels of cohesion. On this basis we propose a reappraisal of the traditional notion of sentence and we define two additional types of discourse units that we consider as the minimal and the maximal span for the notion of sentence.
References (68)
Aijmer, Karin. 2002. English Discourse Particles. Evidence from a Corpus[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 10]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Andersen, Hanne Leth & Nølke, Henning (eds). 2002. Macro-syntaxe et macro-sémantique, Actes du colloque international d’Århus, 17–19 mai 2001. Bern: Peter Lang.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Avanzi, Mathieu, Lacheret, Anne & Victorri, Bernard. 2008. Analor. A tool for semi-automatic annotation of French prosodic structure. In Speech Prosody 2008 , Campinas, Brazil , 119–122.
Bazzanella, Carla. 1995. I segnali discorsivi. In Grande grammatica italiana di consultazione, Vol. III, Lorenzo Renzi, Giampaolo Salvi & Anna Cardinaletti (eds), 225–257. Bologna: Il Mulino.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Beckman, Mary E. & Elman, Gayle Ayers. 1997. Guidelines for ToBi Labelling, version 3. Columbus OH: The Ohio State University Research Foundation.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Benzitoun, Christoph, Dister, Anne, Gerdes, Kim, Kahane, Sylvain, Pietrandrea, Paola & Sabio, Frédéric. 2010. Tu veux couper là faut dire pourquoi. Propositions pour une segmentation syntaxique du français parlé. In Actes du Congrès Mondial de Linguistique Française (CMLF 2010) , New Orleans .
Berrendonner, Alain. 1990. Pour une macro-syntaxe. Travaux de Linguistique 21: 25–31.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2002. Les deux syntaxes. Verbum1–2: 23–35.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2011. Unités syntaxiques & unités prosodiques. Langue Française 170: 81–93. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Blanche-Benveniste, Claire, Borel, Bernard, Deulofeu, José, Durand, Jacky, Giacomi, Alain, Loufrani, Claude, Meziane, Boudjema & Pazery, Nelly. 1979. Des grilles pour le français parlé. Recherches sur le Français Parlé 2: 163–205.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Blanche-Benveniste, Claire. 1990. Un modèle d’analyse syntaxique ‘en grilles’ pour les productions orales. Anuario de Psicologia 47: 11–28.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Blanche-Benveniste, Claire, Bilger, Mireille, Rouget, Christine & Van den Eyende, Karel. 1990. Le français parlé. Etudes grammaticales. Paris: Editions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Blanche-Benveniste, Claire. 2002. Phrase et construction verbale. Verbum1–2: 7–22.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bohmová, Alena, Hajič, Jan, Hajičová, Eva & Hladká, Barbora. 2003. The PDT: A 3-level annotation scenario. In Treebanks: Building and Using Parsed Corpora, Anne Abeillé (ed.), 103–127. Dordrecht: Kluwer.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bolinger, Dwight. 1968. Aspects of Language. New York NY: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bonvino, Elisabetta, Masini, Francesca & Pietrandrea, Paola. 2009. List Constructions: A semantic network. In Troisième Conférence Internationale de l’AFLiCo , Nanterre . [URL]
Bourigault, Didier. 2007. Un analyseur syntaxique opérationnel: SYNTEX. Habilitation à Diriger les Recherches, Université Toulouse-Le Mirail.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Brown, Penelope & Levinson, Stephen. 1978. Universals in language use: Politeness phenomena. In Questions and Politeness: Strategies in Social Interaction, Esther Goody (ed.), 56–310. Cambridge: CUP.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Chafe, Wallace L. 1998. Language and the flow of thought. In The New Psychology of Language, Michael Tomasello (ed.), 93–111. Hillsdale NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cresti, Emanuela. 2000. Corpus di italiano parlato. Florence: Accademia della Crusca.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2005. Enunciato e frase. Teoria e verifiche empiriche. In Italia linguistica: discorsi di scritto e di parlatoEnunciato e frase: Teoria e verifiche empiriche, Scritti in onore di Giovanni Nencioni, Marco Biffi, Omar Calabrese & Luciana Salibra (eds). Siena: Prolagon.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Degand, Liesbeth & Simon, Anne Catherine. 2009. On identifying basic discourse units in speech: Theoretical and empirical issues. Discours 4 [URL] Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Dehé, Nicole & Kavalova, Yordanka. 2006. The syntax, pragmatics, and prosody of parenthetical what . English Language and Linguistics 10: 289–320. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Delais-Roussarie, Élisabeth. 2005. Phonologie et grammaire: Etudes et modélisation des interfaces prosodiques. Habilitation à diriger des recherches, Université de Toulouse-le Mirail.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Deulofeu, José. 1999. Recherches sur les formes de la prédication dans les énoncés assertifs en français contemporain (le cas des énoncés introduits par le morphème que).Thèse d’état, Université Paris 3.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Deulofeu, José, Dufort, Lucie, Gerdes, Kim, Kahane, Sylvain & Pietrandrea, Paola. 2010. Depends on what the French say: Spoken corpus annotation with and beyond syntactic function, 4th Linguistic Annotation Workshop (LAW IV) , ACL, Uppsala, 274–281.
Gerdes, Kim. 2013. Collaborative dependency annotation. In Proceedings of Depling , Prague , 88–97.
Gerdes, Kim & Kahane, Silvain. 2009. Speaking in piles. Paradigmatic annotation of a Spoken French Corpus. In 5th Corpus Linguistics Conference , Liverpool . [URL]
Groupe de Fribourg. 2012. Grammaire de la période. Bern: Peter Lang.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hajič, Jan. 1998. Building a syntactically annotated corpus: The Prague Dependency Treebank. In Issues of Valency and Meaning. Studies in Jonour of Jarmila Panevová, Eva Hajičová (ed.), 106–132. Prague: Karolinum.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
’t Hart, Johan, Collier, René & Cohen, Antonie. 1990. Perceptual Study of Intonation: An Experimental-Phonetic Approach to Speech Melody. Cambridge: CUP. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hasegawa-Johnson, Mark, Chen, Ken, Cole, Jennifer, Borys, Sarah, Kim, Sung-Suk, Cohen, Aaron, Zhang, Tong, Choi, Jeung-Yoon, Kim, Heejin, Yoon, Taejin & Chavarria, Sandra. 2005. Simultaneous recognition of words and prosody in the Boston University Radio Speech Corpus. Speech Communication 46(3–4): 418–439 Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Holmes, Janet. 1986. Functions of you know in women’s and men’s speech, Language in Society 15: 1–21. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kahane, Sylvain. 2012. De l’analyse en grille à la modélisation des entassements. In Penser les langues avec Claire Blanche-Benveniste, Sandrine Caddeo, Marie-Noëlle Roubaud, Magali Rouquier & Frédéric Sabio (eds), 101–116. Aix-en-Provence: Presses de l’université de Provence. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2013. Tutoriel codage microsyntaxique. [URL]
Kahane, Sylvain & Pietrandrea, Paola. 2012a. La typologie des entassements en français. In Actes du 3ème congrès mondial de linguistique française (CMLF) , Lyon , 1809–1828.
. 2012b. Les parenthétiques comme ‘Unités Illocutoires Associées’: Une perspective macrosyntaxique. Linx 61: 49–70.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kleiber, Georges. 2003. Faut-il dire adieu à la phrase? L’information Grammaticale 98: 17–22. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lacheret, Anne & Beaugendre, Frédéric. 1999. La prosodie du français. Paris: Editions du CNRS.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lacheret, Anne. 2003. La prosodie des circonstants en français parlé. Leuven: Peeters.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lacheret, Anne, Kahane, Sylvain, Pietrandrea, Paola, Avanzi, Mathieu, Victorri, Bernard. 2011. Oui mais elle est où la coupure, là? Quand syntaxe et prosodie s’entraident ou se complètent. Langue Française 170: 61–80. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lacheret, Anne, Kahane, Sylvain, Pietrandrea, Paola, Obin, Nicolas, Beliac, Julie, Tchobanov, Atanas, Gerdes, Kim, Goldman, Jean Philippe. 2014. Rhapsodie: a prosodic-syntactic treebank for spoken French. 9th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference . Reykjavik (Iceland), 26–31 May 2014.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Loufrani, Claude. 1984. Le locuteur collectif. Typologie de configurations discursives. Recherches sur le Français Parlé 6: 169–193.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mel’čuk, Igor. 1988. Dependency Syntax: Theory and Practice. New York NY: SUNY Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Miller, Jim & Weinert, Regina. 1998[2009]. Spontaneous Spoken Language. Syntax and Discourse. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Moneglia, Massimo. 2011. Spoken corpora and pragmatics. RBLA 11(2) : 479–519.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Nespor, Marina & Vogel, Irene. 1986 Prosodic Phonology. Dordrecht: Foris.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Nivre, Jaokim. 2008. Treebanks. In Corpus Linguistics, Anke Lüdeling & Merja Kytö (eds), 225–24. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Nølke, Hennng & Adam Jean Michel (eds). 1999. Approches modulaires, de la langue au discours. Lausanne: Delachaux et Niestlé.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Nølke, Henning. 1990. Recherches sur les adverbes: Bref aperçu historique des travaux de classification. Langue Française 88: 117–122. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ostendorf, Mari, Shafran, Izhak, Shattuck-Hufnagel, Stefanie, Carmichael, Leslie & Byrne, William. 2001. A prosodically labeled database of spontaneous speech. In Proceedings ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop on Prosody in Speech Recognition and Understanding , Red Bank, NJ .
Östman, Jan-Ola. 1981. ‘You know’. A Discourse-functional Approach [Pragmatics & Beyond II:7]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ross, John R. 1973. Slifting. In The Formal Analysis of Natural Language, Maurice Gross, Morris Halle, Marcel P. Schützenberger (eds), 133–169. Berlin: Mouton.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Rossi, Mario. 1979. Le français, langue sans accent? In L’accent en français contemporain [Studia Phonetica 15], Ivan Fonagy & Pierre Léon (eds), 13–51. Paris: Didier.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Roulet, Eddy, Filliettaz, Laurent, Grobet, Anne & Burger, Marcel. 2001. Un modèle et un instrument d’analyse de l’organisation du discours, [Collection Sciences pour la Communication]. Bern: Peter Lang.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sabio, Frédéric. 2006. Phrases et constructions verbales: Quelques remarques sur les unités syntaxiques dans le français parlé. In Constructions verbales et production de sens, Daniel Lebaud, Catherine Paulin & Katja Ploog (eds). Besançon: Presses Universitaires de Franche-Comté.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Schelfhout, Carla, Coppen, Peter-Arno & Oostdijk, Nelleke. 2004. Finite comment clauses in Dutch: A corpus-based approach. Journal of Germanic Linguistics 16: 331–349. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Schiffrin, Deborah. 1987. Discourse Markers. Cambridge: CUP. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Selkirk, Elisabeth. 2005. Comments on intonational phrasing. In Prosodies, Sonja Frota, Marina Vigario, M. João Freitas (eds), 11–58. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Villemonte de La Clergerie, Eric. 2005. DyALog: A tabular logic programming based environment for NLP. In 2nd International Workshop on Constraint Solving and Language Processing (CSLP’05) , Barcelona, Spain .
Resources
Avanzi, Mathieu. 2012. L’interface prosodie/syntaxe en français: Dislocations, incises et asyndètes. Bern: Peter Lang.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Avanzi, Mathieu, Simon, Anne Catherine, Goldman, Jean-Philippe & Auchlin, Antoine. 2010. C-PROM. Un corpus de français parlé annoté pour l’étude des proéminences. In Actes des 23èmes journées d’étude sur la parole , Mons, Belgique , 25–28 mai.
Branca-Rosoff, Sonia, Fleury, Serge, Lefeuvre, Florence & Pires, Matthew. 2012. Discours sur la ville. Corpus de Français Parlé Parisien des années 2000 (CFPP2000).[URL]Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Durand, Jacques, Laks, Bernard & Lyche, Chantal. 2009. Le projet PFC (phonologie du français contemporain): Une source de données primaires structurées. In Phonologie, variation et accents du français, Jacques Durand, Bernard Laks & Chantal Lyche (eds), 19–61. Paris: Hermès.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Eshkol-Taravella, Iris, Baude, Olivier, Maurel, Denis, Hriba, Linda, Dugua, Celine & Tellier, Isabelle. 2012. Un grand corpus oral ‘disponible’: Le corpus d’Orléans 1968–2012. In Ressources linguistiques libres, TAL. Vol. 52 – n° 3/2011, 17–46.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lacheret, Anne. 2003. La prosodie des circonstants. Leuven: Peeters.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mertens, Piet. 1987. L’intonation du français: De la description linguistique à la reconnaissance automatique. Thèse de Doctorat, Université de Louvain.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cited by (19)

Cited by 19 other publications

Agmon, Galit, Manuela Jaeger, Ella Magen, Danna Pinto, Yuval Perelmuter, Elana Zion Golumbic & Martin G. Bleichner
2025. Challenges and Methods in Annotating Natural Speech for Neurolinguistic Research. Neurobiology of Language 6 DOI logo
Yang, Linsey C., Wenwei Dong, Nathan Vandeweerd & Jet Hoek
2025. Automatic discourse segmentation of L1 and L2 spoken English transcripts. International Journal of Learner Corpus Research DOI logo
Gregov, Nicolas
2024. Délimitation des diagrammes syntaxiques dans la grammaire scolaire. Travaux de linguistique n° 87:2 ► pp. 129 ff. DOI logo
Minoccheri, Chiara, Christophe Combe, Dejan Stosic, F. Neveu, S. Prévost, A. Montébran, A. Steuckardt, G. Bergounioux, G. Merminod & G. Philippe
2024. À la manière de la presse écrite : l’expression de la manière dans un corpus journalistique en comparaison avec deux autres genres discursifs. SHS Web of Conferences 191 ► pp. 12003 ff. DOI logo
Wang, Xiaoman & Binhua Wang
2024. Exploring automatic methods for the construction of multimodal interpreting corpora. How to transcribe linguistic information and identify paralinguistic properties?. Across Languages and Cultures 25:1 ► pp. 48 ff. DOI logo
Sanguinetti, Manuela, Cristina Bosco, Lauren Cassidy, Özlem Çetinoğlu, Alessandra Teresa Cignarella, Teresa Lynn, Ines Rehbein, Josef Ruppenhofer, Djamé Seddah & Amir Zeldes
2023. Treebanking user-generated content: a UD based overview of guidelines, corpora and unified recommendations. Language Resources and Evaluation 57:2 ► pp. 493 ff. DOI logo
Mikkelsen, Olaf & Stefan Hartmann
2022. Competing future constructions and the Complexity Principle. In Broadening the Spectrum of Corpus Linguistics [Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 105], ► pp. 9 ff. DOI logo
Minoccheri, Chiara, Dejan Stosic, F. Neveu, S. Prévost, A. Steuckardt, G. Bergounioux & B. Hamma
2022. La manière dans tous ses états : une étude exploratoire sur corpus. SHS Web of Conferences 138 ► pp. 11008 ff. DOI logo
Pausé, Marie-Sophie, Agnès Tutin, Olivier Kraif, Maximin Coavoux, F. Neveu, S. Prévost, A. Steuckardt, G. Bergounioux & B. Hamma
2022. Extraction de Phrases Préfabriquées des Interactions à partir d’un corpus arboré du français parlé : une étude exploratoire. SHS Web of Conferences 138 ► pp. 10002 ff. DOI logo
Sabio, Frédéric, Marie-Noëlle Roubaud & Berthille Pallaud
2022. Le début des phrases en français parlé. TIPA. Travaux interdisciplinaires sur la parole et le langage :38 DOI logo
Kibrik, Andrej A., Nikolay A. Korotaev & Vera I. Podlesskaya
2020. The Moscow approach to local discourse structure. In In search of basic units of spoken language [Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 94], ► pp. 367 ff. DOI logo
Ferraresi, Adriano & Silvia Bernardini
2019. Building EPTIC. In Parallel Corpora for Contrastive and Translation Studies [Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 90], ► pp. 123 ff. DOI logo
Bernardini, Silvia, Adriano Ferraresi, Mariachiara Russo, Camille Collard & Bart Defrancq
2018. Building Interpreting and Intermodal Corpora: A How-to for a Formidable Task. In Making Way in Corpus-based Interpreting Studies [New Frontiers in Translation Studies, ], ► pp. 21 ff. DOI logo
Cresti, Emanuela & Massimo Moneglia
2018. The illocutionary basis of information structure. In Information structure in lesser-described languages [Studies in Language Companion Series, 199], ► pp. 359 ff. DOI logo
Sabio, Fréderic
2017. Quel statut accorder aux faits de « détachement » dans un modèle syntaxique à deux composantes ?. Travaux de linguistique n° 74:1 ► pp. 109 ff. DOI logo
Sabio, Frédéric
2018. On the syntax of spoken French. Revue Romane. Langue et littérature. International Journal of Romance Languages and Literatures 53:1 ► pp. 6 ff. DOI logo
Kahane, Sylvain & Nicolas Mazziotta
2016. Quel classement syntaxique pour les « marqueurs discursifs », « mots-phrases » et autres «  inserts  » ? Prédicatifs et locutifs. Travaux de linguistique n° 71:2 ► pp. 7 ff. DOI logo
Belião, Julie
2014. Characterizing Speech Genres through the Relation between Prosody and Macrosyntax. In Pristine Perspectives on Logic, Language, and Computation [Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 8607], ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2019. Rhapsodie [Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 89], DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 1 december 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

audio

Example 36

Example 37

Example 39

Example 44

Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue