Audible paralinguistic phenomena in everyday spoken conversations

evidence from the ord corpus data

Tatiana Sherstinova

pp. 131-145

in: Polina Eismont, Olga Mitrenina, Asya Pereltsvaig (eds), Language, music and computing, Berlin, Springer, 2019

Abstract

Paralinguistic phenomena are non-verbal elements in conversation. Paralinguistic studies are usually based on audio or video recordings of spoken communication. In this article, we will show what kind of audible paralinguistic information may be obtained from the ORD speech corpus of everyday Russian discourse containing long-term audio recordings of conversations made in natural circumstances. This linguistic resource provides rich authentic data for studying the diversity of audible paralinguistic phenomena. The frequency of paralinguistic phenomena in everyday conversations has been calculated on the base of the annotated subcorpus of 187,600 tokens. The most frequent paralinguistic phenomena turned out to be: laughter, inhalation noise, cough, e-like and m-like vocalizations, tongue clicking, and the variety of unclassified non-verbal sounds (calls, exclamations, imitations by voice, etc.). The paper reports on distribution of paralinguistic elements, non-verbal interjections and hesitations in speech of different gender and age groups.