Discourse transcription rules for descriptive and documentary studies

Abstract

Whereas the principles of morphological analysis and glossing are sufficiently standardized in modern linguistics, there are no generally accepted rules for organizing discourse transcript as such. In this paper we propose a standard of transcribing spoken discourse, to be used in a descriptive or documentary project on any language. A transcript must be divided into lines, corresponding to elementary discourse units. A transcript must include an annotation of words, truncated words, pauses, accents, pitch in accents, other prosodic phenomena, as well as punctuation marks conveying phase and other discourse-related meanings. A transcript must be faithful to original signal, register all of its significant elements and avoid artifacts and post-editing. Consistent transcription of discourse in a random language is a manageable task that can be achieved after minimal training.

Keywords

• descriptive linguistics
• documentary linguistics
• discourse transcription
• elementary discourse unit
• prosody
• discourse accent
• punctuation
• pause
• disfluency