ABSTRACT
I illustrate the transcription system with a brief segment of speech excerpted from a conversation. The speaker, a woman who was in conversation with a man, had just been talking about how another woman and her two children had moved into a new apartment. My discussion would obviously be more meaningful if the reader had access to the recording from which I worked. Without such access, the reader can only imagine the sound of this selection. By the end of the discussion I hope to have made at least some of its important features accessible. The features I deal with here include words, pauses, lengthenings, terminal pitch contours, and both primary and secondary accents. These features are particularly useful in establishing the boundaries and nuclei of intonation and accent units, on which the subsequent discussion depends. Other prosodic features one might want to record, such as changes in tempo, volume, or pitch range, laughter, whispering, and so forth, are covered in Du Bois, Schuetze-Coburn, Cumming, and Paolino (this volume).
