Speech

Documentation: speech tags

Guidelines 11 deals with transcriptions of speech, and begins with the disclaimer that ‘the present proposals are not intended to support unmodified every variety of research undertaken upon spoken material now or in the future; some discourse analysts, some phonologists, and doubtless others may wish to extend the scheme presented here to express more precisely the set of distinctions they wish to draw in their transcriptions’. NECTE uses a small selection of tags from those provided by TEI:

, the TEI ‘utterance’ tag.  is ‘a stretch of speech usually preceded or followed by silence or by a change of speaker’ (Guidelines 11.2). It is used in exactly this way to mark speaker utterances in all the NECTE representational types; the 'id' attribute in each case identifies the speaker in question, ie, . Uniqueness of speaker 'id's is guaranteed by suffixing to 'interviewer' or 'informant', as appropriate, the entity name for the interview in question from the list defined by <!ENTITY % interviews SYSTEM 'interviews.ent'> %interviews; in the DOCTYPE declaration; where there is more than one informant, which is invariably the case in the PVC-derived interviews and occasionally in the TLS-derived ones, a final 'a', 'b', 'c'... is appended, ie, , , and so on.

<pause/> (Guidelines 11.2.2) marks ‘a pause between or within utterances’.

<vocal> (Guidelines 11.2.3) marks ‘any vocalized but not necessarily lexical phonemenon, for example voiced pauses, non-lexical back-channels, etc’. NECTE uses this tag not only for voiced pauses but also for other phenomena such as laughter.

<event> (Guidelines 11.2) marks ‘any phenomenon or occurrence, not necessarily vocalized or communicative, for example incidental noises or other events affecting communication’. The main NECTE use of this tag is to note interruptions of one speaker by another.