In Search of Basic Units of Spoken Language

This chapter reports a quantitative and qualitative comparison of seven annotations performed on the same two American English texts: a monologue and a dialogue. The analysis of these data is complex, since the annotations have been made independently by each research group on the basis of their own theoretical frameworks. Despite this difference, the fundamental role of prosody in the analysis of speech emerges clearly in every annotation. Prosodic breaks can be then viewed as theory independen