TY - GEN

T1 - Phrase breaks in everyday conversations from sociolinguistic perspective

AU - Bogdanova-Beglarian, Natalia

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019.

PY - 2019

Y1 - 2019

N2 - This study was made on the base of the ORD corpus of everyday spoken Russian, containing the rich collection of audio recordings made in real-life settings. Speech transcripts of the ORD corpus imply mandatory indication of word and phrase breaks, self-correction, hesitations, fillers and other irregularities of spoken discourse. The paper deals with speech breaks in oral discourse (word breaks, phrase breaks, intraphrasal pauses, etc.). Quantitative analysis performed on the subcorpus of 187 600 tokens has shown that 7,56% of all phrases in everyday communication are not finished. If word breaks can be referred to word search/choice or self-correction, phrase breaks affect the text level and result in ragged, rough, and poorly structured syntactic sequence. Sociolinguistic analysis has revealed that phrase breaks are more frequent in men’s speech than in the women’s (8.16 vs. 7,12%). Seniors have significantly more speech breaks (10,76%) than children (6,78%), youth (6,08%) and middle-aged people (7,37%). As for status groups of speakers, the highest share of breaks is found in speech of unemployed and retired people (10,75%), whereas the lowest percentage of breaks is observed in speech of managers (4,50%) who care, apparently, more about their speech quality than others.

AB - This study was made on the base of the ORD corpus of everyday spoken Russian, containing the rich collection of audio recordings made in real-life settings. Speech transcripts of the ORD corpus imply mandatory indication of word and phrase breaks, self-correction, hesitations, fillers and other irregularities of spoken discourse. The paper deals with speech breaks in oral discourse (word breaks, phrase breaks, intraphrasal pauses, etc.). Quantitative analysis performed on the subcorpus of 187 600 tokens has shown that 7,56% of all phrases in everyday communication are not finished. If word breaks can be referred to word search/choice or self-correction, phrase breaks affect the text level and result in ragged, rough, and poorly structured syntactic sequence. Sociolinguistic analysis has revealed that phrase breaks are more frequent in men’s speech than in the women’s (8.16 vs. 7,12%). Seniors have significantly more speech breaks (10,76%) than children (6,78%), youth (6,08%) and middle-aged people (7,37%). As for status groups of speakers, the highest share of breaks is found in speech of unemployed and retired people (10,75%), whereas the lowest percentage of breaks is observed in speech of managers (4,50%) who care, apparently, more about their speech quality than others.

KW - Phrase breaks

KW - Sociophonetics

KW - Speech disfluencies

KW - Spoken Russian

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85059807821&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1007/978-3-030-05594-3_10

DO - 10.1007/978-3-030-05594-3_10

M3 - Conference contribution

AN - SCOPUS:85059807821

SN - 9783030055936

T3 - Communications in Computer and Information Science

SP - 122

EP - 130

BT - Language, Music and Computing - Second International Workshop, LMAC 2017, Revised Selected Papers

A2 - Mitrenina, Olga

A2 - Pereltsvaig, Asya

A2 - Eismont, Polina

PB - Springer Nature

T2 - 2nd International Workshop on Language, Music and Computing, LMAC 2017

Y2 - 17 April 2017 through 19 April 2017

ER -