The notion of orality
It is well known that spoken language is not always a synonym to orality, if we understand orality as the presence of linguistic, paralinguistic and interactive phenomena, such as retracting or overlapping, which are not present in the written register. The registers in spoken language vary depending on the communicative situation. For instance, a text being a transcription of a sermon will differ significantly from a private conversation between friends, as far as the subject, the communicative context, the goals and the relation between participants are concerned (Romaine, 1996).
These differences are present not only at a
morpho-syntactic, lexical and discoursive levels, but also at a more basic level which has to do with discourse production and which we will refer to as degree of orality.
The goal of this paper is to study that degree of orality considering the different conversational genres established in C-ORAL-ROM, in such a way that the hy
pothesis stated at the beginning -the presence of certain spoken features makes the transcription process much more difficult- can be confirmed.
Those phenomena chosen as the object of this
experiment are typical features of spontaneous speech: overlapping, retractings, dialogic turns, speaking speed, fragmented words (“psicolog” instead of “psicología”, for example) or supports, coded in C-ORAL-ROM as &ah and &eh.
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