Units in Thai?

[rberman]

Dear Jordan,

following Brian's really very helpful and thoughtful
suggestions about the frogstory coding, which obviously
I as one of the original frogbook team feel very comfortable
with, let me offer you some insights which have emerged
from our current crosslinguistic study of narrative and
expository texts produced in speech and writing by older
children (from age 9 years and up) and adults:  We have
found that for the spoken data, which is what I assume
you are interested in, it helps to include all kinds of
indications of prosodic and other phonological features,
far beyond what we even attempted in the original cross-
linguistic study.  Then, one way to go is to add to the
Berman & slobin guidelines (using clauses, though serial -verb
languages could indeed be problematic in this respect,
in really theoretically interesting ways) such analyses
as length, amount, and position of PAUSES, trying to divide
up the texts into INTONATION UNITS as this is defined by
the UC Santa Barbara group (Wallace Chafe, John du Bois,
inter alia).  I know we felt that we missed out on a great
deal of relevant information by not having enough prosodic
information in our transcripts -- but we also realized that
for complex crosslinguistic studies like ours, this would
get us bogged down in enormously time-consuming efforts,
and make it difficult to achieve crosslanguage and crossmodal
comparability.

Hope this helps you some.
Best wishes,
Ruth Berman