Cantonese turn-initial minimal particles: annotation of discourse-interactional functions in dialog corpora

This interactional linguistic study is concerned with the annotation of discourse-interactional functions of turn-initial particles in Cantonese conversation. These particles (or intersections) are commonly transcribed as ngo (哦),ng (嗯), aa (啊), aak (呃) and can format a range of functions both as turn-initial utterances or as stand-alone turns. Based on the analysis of 20 hours of naturally-occurring video corpus data, the study identifies five discourse-interactional functions that the most ‘minimal’ (i.e. shortest and mostly monophthongic) of these utterances can format: continuers, positive response tokens, change-ofstate
tokens, turn management tokens and repair initiators. I then show that three dimensions have to be taken into account to annotate those functions: sequential position, pitch contour and phonetic production format. In contrast to existing annotation taxonomies that directly map production format to function, I argue that discourse-interactional functions of these particles can only be annotated with reasonable accuracy if at least these three structural
dimensions are taken into account. I conclude with discussing the relation between sequential position, sound and pitch format for each function.