ISCA Archive Eurospeech 1999
ISCA Archive Eurospeech 1999

A profile of the discourse and intonational structures of route descriptions

Sandra Williams, Catherine I. Watson

A corpus of spontaneous route descriptions was collected from 8 speakers (5 males and 3 females). The corpus was labelled according to the ToBI standard and a discourse analysis was completed. Four discourse tour acts were identified and these were found to occur mainly in non-embedded linear sequences. In general, the intonation of each route description was characterised by a single intonational phrase containing many intermediate phrases. There was a tendency for boundaries between tour acts and intermediate phrases to coincide, but there is usually more than one intermediate phrase to one tour act.