Prosodic transcription

Prosodic transcription covers functional phonetic categories which occur in parallel with lexically relevant segmental items such as phonemes and syllables, and may be lexically or sentence-syntactically functional, such as:

• accentuation,
• tone,
• intonation,
• rhythm,
• loudness.

A prosodic category which does not fall under this general definition is

• pause.

Other paralinguistic categories which are not lexically or sentence-syntactically functional include the following:

1. `exaggerated' modifications of prosodic features,
2. breathing sounds,
3. lip-smacking, tongue-clicking,
4. acoustico-gestural categories of articulatory posture such as continued lip-rounding (`pouting'), nasalisation, creaky voice.

Vocalisations such as um, aha, etc., must be annotated; these can be seen as quasi-lexical items with non-phonemic and discourse-oriented functions.

Finally, it may be very important to transcribe environmental and technical noises.