The seminar series “Identifying units of organization in spoken discourse: theory and methods” aims at fostering theoretical and methodological exchanges between scholars interested in the challenges of defining, identifying, and analyzing the fundamental units that structure naturally occurring spoken interaction.
Different types of units can be identified at different levels: conversational moves at the level of interaction (cf. Jefferson 2004), syntactic units if we consider language structure, and intonation units at the prosodic level (Chafe, 1994). Focusing on the latter, spoken language is widely considered to be produced in intonation units (IUs), chunks of discourse identified by coherent prosodic contours, such as pitch movement, intonational contour, rhythm, pausing, etc. (Chafe, 1994; Du Bois & Schuetze-Coburn, 1993). The chunking of speech into units of intonation has been linked to a wide range of cognitive and interactional functions, such as the management of information flow (Chafe, 1980; Clancy et al., 1996; Croft, 1995; Matsumoto, 2000; Schuetze-Coburn et al., 1991; Tao, 1996), the parsing of new information (Simpson & del Prado Martín, 2015), and the identification and management of talk and action in the speech of interlocutors (Selting, 2000; Szczepek Reed, 2012). Intonation units can be identified solely on prosodic grounds (Carlson et al., 2005; Himmelmann et al., 2018; Troiani, 2023), which makes them an ideal tool for language documentation and corpus design, as shown by the experiences of the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English (Du Bois et al. 2000) and the Multimedia Corpus of Spoken Kazakh Language (Troiani et al. 2026).
We imagine this series as a venue to:
- foster dialogue across theoretical frameworks, methodological approaches, and linguistic traditions relative to the prosodic, syntactic, and interactional dimensions of basic units of speech;
- discuss the methodological challenges related to the identification of these units in typologically diverse languages of the world to create comparative perspectives that highlight both language-specific phenomena and cross-linguistic regularities;
- engage in empirically grounded research exploring how prosodic cues, syntactic structures, and interactional functions jointly shape the organization of spoken discourse.
The seminar cycle takes place in a hybrid format. In-person events take place at the University of Bologna, specific information about times and rooms is available on the individual page dedicated to each talk. Attendance is free of charge. Online attendance is possible through a Teams link that will be emailed to participants who enroll through the registration form below.