Chapter 6. The Moscow approach to local discourse structure: An application to English

This chapter is an exploratory study in which we apply an approach to local discourse structure and prosody, developed for spoken Russian, to English talk. A key conceptual element of our approach is the notion of elementary discourse unit (EDU). EDUs are identified on the basis of prosodic criteria and demonstrate substantial correspondence to clauses. A range of structural, prosodic and discourse-semantic phenomena are reviewed, including pausing, discourse accent, phase, and spoken sentence. The analysis begins with those phenomena that are characteristic of both monologic and multi-party discourse, and proceeds with those features that are only found in interactional exchange. The Russian-oriented system of discourse transcription and analysis turns out to be generally applicable to the English evidence.