On the Use of Prosodic Labelling in Corpus-Based Linguistic Studies of Spontaneous Speech

This paper addresses the construction of a spontaneous speech corpus in European Portuguese (hereafter EP), the corpus is presented and a prosodic labeling scheme that is here proposed is explained. The objective of this work is to provide a tool for linguistic analysis suitable to several research topics, which have speech and dialogue as objects. The main features considered in the database will be described and justified. Methodological problems and some observed prosodic and pragmatic related phenomena deriving from the labeling of the speech signal are also presented. A discussion is done about some applications on pragmatic studies, speech synthesis and prosodic phonology. Our purpose is to make this work available to scientific community, since there isn’t any other database of this kind available and informatically accessible for EP. Future perspectives of the on-going work are also previewed.