Prosodic Aspects of Discourse Boundaries in Conversation

경계음절에서 나타나는 대화체 언어의 운율 현상

This paper investigates the prosodic characteristics of discourse boundaries in spontaneous conversation. In this study, the term 'conversation' is taken to refer to a kind of talk in which two or more participants alternate in speaking about particular topics. Such a definition implies that there are at least two sorts of structures in the conversation: textual structure and interactive structure. This requires us to consider not just the textual influences on prosody but also the impact of interactive context. The aim of this study is to find out the acoustic-prosodic means used by speakers to signal discourse boundaries in conversational interaction. The results show that the conflict between the structural level and the interactive level obliges the speakers to reorganize the prosodic variables according to the type of discourse boundaries.