ISCA Archive SpeechProsody 2004
ISCA Archive SpeechProsody 2004

Prosody as marker of direct reported speech boundary

Miguel Oliveira Jr., Dóris A. C. Cunha

The present paper aims at analyzing the role of prosody as a marker of direct reported speech boundaries in discourse. The beginning of a citation in speech is often linguistically marked, generally by means of a verb of saying. However, it is not always a straightforward task to determine at what point exactly a citation ends. Through the analysis of a series of excerpts extracted from spontaneous interviews, we investigate to what extent prosody functions as a cue for the delimitation of a direct citation in speech.