The topic in oral discourse: annotation and characterization of different topics in spoken corpora

Abstract

In this study, we annotate and characterize different types of discourse topic in texts extracted from two speech corpora, with emphasis on constituents of left periphery, to i) propose a taxonomy for semantic-discursive description of these constituents using Praat; ii) characterize the types of occurring topics; iii) discuss the results. These results, both qualitative and quantitative, reveal thatspeakers organize information flow following different discourse strategies, which are articulated with syntactic and prosodic structures, but also with the genre of the oral discourse at stake.