Transcribing Mandarin Chinese Conversation: Linguistic and Prosodic Issues

Abstract

This study addresses some of the issues in the transcription of Chinese spoken discourse, with a particular focus on transcription solutions for various linguistic and vocal features of Mandarin conversation. While there is a great deal of complexity in Chinese spoken discourse, current practices in transcribing spoken Chinese and in building spoken corpora contain essentially no standards. Therefore, this study selects the linguistic and vocal features of spoken Chinese that meet the criteria of 1) highly recurrent in spoken Chinese; and 2) posing the most trouble in transcription. The features that need urgent attention in transcription include discourse particles, non-lexical vocalizations, and repairs. Given the centrality of spoken discourse, and conversation in particular, in discourse research, it is critically important to discuss key issues in transcribing Mandarin Chinese and then propose some ways for corpus building in the field of Chinese linguistics, which we do in this paper.