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<Paper uid="P98-2211">
  <Title>tappe, Coherence in Spoken Discourse*</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="1295" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
2 Method and material
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"/>
    <Section position="1" start_page="0" end_page="1294" type="sub_section">
      <SectionTitle>
2.1 Method
</SectionTitle>
      <Paragraph position="0"> Subjects were presented with sketch-maps. These were previously drawn by students who had been asked to sketch the route between the Computer Science Department and the main campus of their university. Since the two landmarks are approximately 6 km apart, all of the sketch-maps included some means of transport. The drawings were made on a drawing tablet and subsequently stored on a computer hard-disc. In the verbalisation-phase replays of the drawings were used as stimulus material. A new group of subjects was presented with one of the drawings. They had to carefully watch what happened and simultaneously describe what they were seeing, while the graphical objects became visible on the previously empty screen in the same chronological order they were produced. The verbalisers were familiar with the route between the two Uni- null versity buildings, yet they did not know what material they were going to be confronted with.</Paragraph>
    </Section>
    <Section position="2" start_page="1294" end_page="1295" type="sub_section">
      <SectionTitle>
2.2 Material
</SectionTitle>
      <Paragraph position="0"> For the present analysis we chose a fragment of one of the online-verbalisations, consisting of the first seven utterances describing the sketch-map segment that is illustrated in figure 1.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="1">  The graphical objects in this sketch represent the following objects: the Computer Science department and the streets leading from the building. This part of the sketch-map is described by a 32 year old, right-handed computer scientist.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="2"> 3 Analysis of the text fragment The text fragment contains a variety of features that are characteristic of spoken rather than of written discourse. In this section we will look at each of the utterances in greater detail and show how the discourse coherence is maintained by the speaker. He starts talking as soon as he sees the rectangle being drawn on the screen. The first utterance (U1) can be characterised as a statement about the speaker's current mental state: UI: Ja, ich weiB ja schon worum es geht, (Yes, I already know what this is all about,) The speaker hereby expresses a self-belief the content of which can be circumscribed as follows: I (the speaker) know which states-of-affairs I am about to see on the computer screen. This utterance serves as a kind of background for what follows. With his statement, the speaker commits himself to prove that he really knows what is going on. With the subsequent utterance (U2) he demonstrates that he has at least some intuition about the stimulus material: He assigns the rectangle the name of the depicted real world object.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="3"> U2: also das wird das Informatikgebtiude... mit der Beschreibung daneben. (well this is going to be the building of the Computer Science department.., with the annotation next to it) Accordingly, he fulfills part of the felicity conditions that accompany assertions about the possession of knowledge, i.e. he elaborates on the content of his belief-state. The elaboration-relation between (U1) and (U2) is triggered by the discourse marker also. With the next utterance the speaker adds further information to his states-ofaffairs-description. null U3: und die StraSen die jetzt angefangen werden zu malen...(and the streets that are now started to be drawn... ) Therefore, we can categorise the relation between (U2) and (U3) as a narration-relation. This relation does not add a new perspective or a new theme to the ongoing discourse, but rather supports its continuation. On contrast, (U4) establishes a break in the ongoing discourse. The discourse marker eigentlich signals that the speakers has build up an expectation about the continuation of the drawing event on the basis of his belief state.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="4"> U4: Eigentlich wiirde ich erwarten,(Actually I would expect) null The content of the belief state is -- as mentioned before -- that the speaker believes to know what will be drawn. Yet, this belief state ends here, because even though the speaker rightly interprets the developing double lines to represent streets (cf. U3 above) his further expectation is not met. The content of this expectation is expressed in (U5): U5: daB irgendwo die Bushaltestelle noch eingezeichnet wird, da im... (that the bus stop was drawn into it somewhere, there in the... ) Obviously the speaker expects that the drawing will contain a symbol representing a bus-stop near to the building. This is not the case. Therefore the rhetorical relation between (U4) and (U1) is that of a termination. We see that rhetorical relations do not necessarily hold between adjacent utterances only, but that an utterance may open a subtree that can be closed off by an utterance that is verbalised a couple of utterances later. (U5) breaks off with a prepositional phrase that lacks the location argument (...da im...). The speaker is quite obviously insecure about the name of the street that contains the bus-stop.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="5"> (U6) reveals his insecurity.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="6"> U6: (a) wie heist das Ding, heist das Gazellenkamp? (b) Ja, ne? ... (what is it called, is it called Gazellenkamp? Yes, isn't it?... ) The structure in U6 is very typical for spoken dis- null course. It is not in a strict sense part of the ongoing discourse, but the verbalisation of vocabulary search and planning processes. We hold that the interrogative intonation functions as a signal, allowing the integration of a substructure that is not connected to the previous discourse via a prototypical rhetorical relation. The substructure itself can be interpreted as a meta-comment about the ongoing mental processes. This substructure is closed off by (U7) which begins with aber ('but').</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="7"> U7:Aber .... keine Bushaltestelle (But... no bus stop) This discourse marker allows the speaker to return to the branching node of the discourse structure where the digression was introduced.</Paragraph>
    </Section>
  </Section>
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