P5: Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange

8.3.1 UtterancesTEI: Utterances¶

Use of the who attribute to associate the utterance with a particular speaker is recommended but not required. Its use implies as a further requirement that all speakers be identified by a person or personGrp element in the TEI header (see section 15.2.2 The Participant Description). Where utterances or other parts of the transcription cannot be attributed with confidence to any particular participant or group of participants, the encoder may choose to define ‘participants’ such as all or various, or unknown.

An utterance may contain either running text, or text within which other basic structural elements are nested. Where such nesting occurs, the who attribute is considered to be inherited for the elements pause, vocal, shift and kinesic; that is, a pause or shift (etc.) within an utterance is regarded as being produced by that speaker only, while a pause between utterances applies to all speakers.

8.3.2 PausingTEI: Pausing¶

8.3.3 Vocal, Kinesic, IncidentTEI: Vocal, Kinesic, Incident¶

The who attribute should be used to specify the person or group responsible for a vocal, kinesic, or incident which is contained within an utterance, if this differs from that of the enclosing utterance. The attribute must be supplied for a vocal, kinesic, or incident which is not contained within an utterance.

The iterated attribute may be used to indicate that the vocal, kinesic, or incident is repeated, for example laughter as opposed to laugh. These should both be distinguished from laughing, where what is being encoded is a shift in voice quality. For this last case, the shift element discussed in section 8.3.6 Shifts should be used.

The extent to which encoding of incidents or kinesics is included in a transcription will depend entirely on the purpose for which the transcription was made. As elsewhere, this will depend on the particular research agenda and the extent to which their presence is felt to be significant for the interpretation of spoken interactions.

8.3.4 WritingTEI: Writing¶

8.3.5 Temporal InformationTEI: Temporal Information¶

As noted above, utterances, vocals, pauses, kinesics, incidents, and writing elements all inherit attributes providing information about their position in time from the classes att.timed and att.duration. These attributes can be used to link parts of the transcription very exactly with points on a timeline, or simply to indicate their duration. Note that if start and end point to when elements whose temporal distance from each other is specified in a timeline, then dur is ignored.

The anchor element (see 16.4 Correspondence and Alignment) may be used as an alternative means of aligning the start and end of timed elements, and is required when the temporal alignment involves points within an element.

For further discussion of temporal alignment and synchronization see 8.4.2 Synchronization and Overlap below.

8.3.6 ShiftsTEI: Shifts¶

The values proposed here for the feature attribute are based on those used by the Survey of English Usage (see further Boase 1990); this list may be revised or supplemented using the methods outlined in section 23.2 Personalization and Customization.

The new attribute specifies the new state of the feature following the shift. If no value is specified, it is implied that the feature concerned ceases to be remarkable at this point: the special value normal may be specified to have the same effect.

A full definition of the sense of the values provided for each feature should be provided in the encoding description section of the text header (see section 2.3 The Encoding Description).

8.4.1 SegmentationTEI: Segmentation¶

For some analytic purposes it may be desirable to subdivide the divisions of a spoken text into units smaller than the individual utterance or turn. Segmentation may be performed for a number of different purposes and in terms of a variety of speech phenomena. Common examples include units defined both prosodically (by intonation, pausing, etc.) and syntactically (clauses, phrases, etc.) The term macrosyntagm has been used by a number of researchers to define units peculiar to speech transcripts. ²⁷

These Guidelines propose that such analyses be performed in terms of neutrally-named segments, represented by the seg element, which is discussed more fully in section 16.3 Blocks, Segments, and Anchors. This element may take a type attribute to specify the kind of segmentation applicable to a particular segment, if more than one is possible in a text. A full definition of the segmentation scheme or schemes used should be provided in the segmentation element of the editorialDecl element in the TEI header (see 2.3.3 The Editorial Practices Declaration).

When utterances are segmented end-to-end in the same way as the s-units in written texts, the s element discussed in chapter 17 Simple Analytic Mechanisms may be used, either as an alternative or in addition to the more general purpose seg element. The s element is available without formality in all texts, but does not allow segments to nest within each other.

This example also uses the core elements gap and del to mark editorial decisions concerning matter completely omitted from the transcript (because of inaudibility), and words which have been transcribed but which the transcriber wishes to exclude from the segment because they are repeated, respectively. See section 3.4 Simple Editorial Changes for a discussion of these and related elements.

8.4.2 Synchronization and OverlapTEI: Synchronization and Overlap¶

For a full discussion of this and related mechanisms, section 16.5.2 Placing Synchronous Events in Time should be consulted. The rest of the present section, which should be read in conjunction with that more detailed discussion, presents a number of ways in which these mechanisms may be applied to the specific problem of representing temporal alignment, synchrony, or overlap in transcribing spoken texts.

In the simple example above, the first utterance (that with identifier utt1) contains an anchor element, the function of which is simply to mark a point within it. The synch attribute associated with this anchor point specifies the identifiers of the other two elements which are to be synchronized with it: specifically, the second utterance (utt2) and the kinesic (k1). Note that one of these elements has content and the other is empty.

This example demonstrates only a way of indicating a point within one utterance at which it can be synchronized with another utterance and a kinesic. For more complex kinds of alignment, involving possibly multiple synchronization points, an additional element is provided, known as a timeline. This consists of a series of when elements, each representing a point in time, and bearing attributes which indicate its exact temporal position relative to other elements in the same timeline, in addition to the sequencing implied by its position within it.

One or more such timelines may be specified within a spoken text, to suit the encoder's convenience. If more than one is supplied, the origin attribute may be used on each to specify which other timeline element it follows. The unit attribute indicates the units used for timings given on when elements contained by the alignment map. Alternatively, to avoid the need to specify times explicitly, the interval attribute may be used to indicate that all the when elements in a time line are a fixed distance apart.

Note that in each case, although Bob's utterance follows Tom's sequentially in the text, it is aligned temporally with its middle, without any need to disrupt the normal syntax of the text.

8.4.3 Regularization of Word FormsTEI: Regularization of Word Forms¶

When speech is transcribed using ordinary orthographic notation, as is customary, some compromise must be made between the sounds produced and conventional orthography. Particularly when dealing with informal, dialectal, or other varieties of language, the transcriber will frequently have to decide whether a particular sound is to be treated as a distinct vocabulary item or not. For example, while in a given project kinda may not be worth distinguishing as a vocabulary item from kind of, isn't may clearly be worth distinguishing from is not; for some purposes, the regional variant isnae might also be worth distinguishing in the same way.

One rule of thumb might be to allow such variation only where a generally accepted orthographic form exists, for example, in published dictionaries of the language register being encoded; this has the disadvantage that such dictionaries may not exist. Another is to maintain a controlled (but extensible) set of normalized forms for all such words; this has the advantage of enforcing some degree of consistency among different transcribers. Occasionally, as for example when transcribing abbreviations or acronyms, it may be felt necessary to depart from conventional spelling to distinguish between cases where the abbreviation is spelled out letter by letter (e.g. B B C or V A T) and where it is pronounced as a single word (VAT or RADA). Similar considerations might apply to pronunciation of foreign words (e.g. Monsewer vs. Monsieur).

In general, use of punctuation, capitalization, etc., in spoken transcripts should be carefully controlled. It is important to distinguish the transcriber's intuition as to what the punctuation should be from the marking of prosodic features such as pausing, intonation, etc.

Whatever practice is adopted, it is essential that it be clearly and fully documented in the editorial declarations section of the header. It may also be found helpful to include normalized forms of non-conventional spellings within the text, using the elements for simple editorial changes described in section 3.4 Simple Editorial Changes (see further section 8.4.5 Speech Management).

8.4.4 ProsodyTEI: Prosody¶

In the absence of conventional punctuation, the marking of prosodic features assumes paramount importance, since these structure and organize the spoken message. Indeed, such prosodic features as points of primary or secondary stress may be represented by specialized punctuation marks, or other characters such as those provided by the Unicode Spacing Modifier Letters block. Pauses have already been dealt with in section 8.3.2 Pausing; while tone units (or intonational phrases) can be indicated by the segmentation tag discussed in section 8.4.1 Segmentation. The shift element discussed in section 8.3.6 Shifts may also be used to encode some prosodic features, for example where all that is required is the ability to record shifts in voice quality.

In a more detailed phonological transcript, it is common practice to include a number of conventional signs to mark prosodic features of the surrounding or (more usually) preceding speech. Such signs may be used to record, for example, particular intonation patterns, truncation, vowel quality (long or short) etc. These signs may be preserved in a transcript either by using conventional punctuation or by marking their presence by g elements. Where a transcript includes many phonetic or phonemic aspects, it will generally be more convenient to use the appropriate Unicode characters (see further chapters vi. Languages and Character Sets and 5 Representation of Non-standard Characters and Glyphs). For representation of phonemic information, the use of the International Phonetic Alphabet, which can be represented in Unicode characters, is recommended.

This example, which is taken from a corpus of bookshop service encounters, also demonstrates the use of the unclear and gap elements discussed in section 3.4 Simple Editorial Changes. Where words are so unclear that only their extent can be recorded, the empty gap element may be used; where the encoder can identify the words but wishes to record a degree of uncertainty about their accuracy, the unclear element may be used. More flexible and detailed methods of indicating uncertainty are discussed in chapter 21 Certainty, Precision, and Responsibility.

For more detailed work, involving a detailed phonological transcript including representation of stress and pitch patterns, it is probably best to maintain the prosodic description in parallel with the conventional written transcript, rather than attempt to embed detailed prosodic information within it. The two parallel streams may be aligned with each other and with other streams, for example an acoustic encoding, using the general alignment mechanisms discussed in section 8.3.6 Shifts.

8.4.5 Speech ManagementTEI: Speech Management¶

Phenomena of speech management include disfluencies such as filled and unfilled pauses, interrupted or repeated words, corrections, and reformulations as well as interactional devices asking for or providing feedback. Depending on the importance attached to such features, transcribers may choose to adopt conventionalized representations for them (as discussed in section 8.4.3 Regularization of Word Forms above), or to transcribe them using IPA or some other transcription system. To simplify analysis of the lexical features of a speech transcript, it may be felt useful to ‘tidy away’ many of these disfluencies. Where this policy has been adopted, these Guidelines recommend the use of the tags for simple editorial intervention discussed in section 3.4 Simple Editorial Changes, to make explicit the extent of regularization or normalization performed by the transcriber.

8.4.6 Analytic CodingTEI: Analytic Coding¶

The recommendations made here only concern the establishment of a basic text. Where a more sophisticated analysis is needed, more sophisticated methods of markup will also be appropriate, for example, using stand-off markup to indicate multiple segmentation of the stream of discourse, or complex alignment of several segments within it. Where additional annotations (sometimes called ‘codes’ or ‘tags’) are used to represent such features as linguistic word class (noun, verb, etc.), type of speech act (imperative, concessive, etc.), or information status (theme/rheme, given/new, active/semi-active/new), etc., a selection from the general purpose analytic tools discussed in chapters 16 Linking, Segmentation, and Alignment, 17 Simple Analytic Mechanisms, and 18 Feature Structures, may be used to advantage.