Audible Paralinguistic Phenomena in Everyday Spoken Conversations: Evidence from the ORD Corpus Data

P. 131–145.

Sherstinova T.

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 nonverbal
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.

Keywords: gender, Russian language, age, hesitations, laughter, paralinguistics, speech corpus, vocalizations, Audible paralinguistic phenomena, Everyday conversation, Spoken interaction, Interjections, Fillers

In book

Language, Music and Computing. Second International Workshop, LMAC 2017, St. Petersburg, Russia, April 17–19, 2017, Revised Selected Papers

Vol. 943. , Switzerland: Springer, 2019.