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Syntactic, prosodic, and conversationa units in conversation

Speaking involves multitasking. Speakers must pace the type and amount of information given to their listeners, while putting together grammatical constructions and maintaining engagement with interlocutors. They achieve these goals in milliseconds, distilling layers of linguistic and sociocultural knowledge into intonation units (IUs) – chunks of speech identified by specific acoustic cues. The main objective of SPEAK (/spi:k/ ‘Convergence of syntactic, prosodic, and interactional units in conversation’) is to identify the basic units of organization of spoken discourse. To achieve this goal, the project combines corpus analysis and experimental methods to investigate to what degree intonation units correspond to units of syntax and communicative functions in spoken interaction.