37.3081, FYI: Seminar Cycle - Identifying Units of Organization in Spoken Discourse: Theory and Methods

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-37-3081. Fri Sep 25 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.3081, FYI: Seminar Cycle - Identifying Units of Organization in Spoken Discourse: Theory and Methods

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Date: 25-Sep-2026
From: Giorgia Troiani [giorgia.troiani at unibo.it]
Subject: Seminar Cycle - Identifying Units of Organization in Spoken Discourse: Theory and Methods


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 is organized by Giorgia Troiani and Caterina Mauri
as part of the MSCA project SPEAK 'Convergence of syntactic, prosodic,
and interactional units in conversation'. The event is funded by the
European Union. Information about the project can be found at
https://site.unibo.it/msca_speak/en.
The full program of the cycle is available at
https://site.unibo.it/msca_speak/en/events/seminar-intonation-units.
Events will take place in person at the University of Bologna. Online
attendance is possible in the modalities explained on the project's
website.

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics
                     Syntax
                     Text/Corpus Linguistics




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