The Transcribing Rules Of DT2 And Its Application In The Transcription And Annotation Of Cantonese Discourse

DT(Discourse Transcription) was first proposed by Du Bois in 1992, based on American English spoken corpora in Santa Barbara University transcription system. This transcription has been developed into the DT2 stage at present. This paper introduced the rules and annotating methods for basic description of the DT2 system in a method of qualitative analysis, and put examples of application in spoken Cantonese transcription.In chapter 1, we respectively elaborated and analyzed the present research situation on the transcription of natural discourse and spoken Cantonese, and thought that in the present there are some shortcomings in the area of spoken Cantonese transcribing. Chapter 2 briefly introduced the basic concepts of DT2 and the overall transcribing rules. Chapter 3 has been divided into two parts: core and meta data, described the rules and annotating symbols from level 1 to level 4 in detail. We also put some spoken Cantonese transcription examples to demonstrated the way we transcribed and annotated. Chapter 4 provided a completed spoken Cantonese transcription example, and use the method of quantitative statistical analysis to highlighted the features spoken Cantonese language under the DT2 transcription system.Conclusions:(1) In the brief introduction of chapter 2, we thought that compares to others,this system is more practical and in terms of its complexity, we made a brief and systematical introduction about it.(2) Through the analysis of the application of DT2 in chapter 3,we founded that this transcription system is able to meet the need of spoken‘Cantonese describing and provides more discourse information than other systems.(3)The analysis of the example in chapter 4 has demonstrated that there are four types in Cantonese intonation tones: questions, succeeded, end and interrupt intonation. The transcription from 1 level to 3 level basically meet the general requests in the transcription. Compares to other systems, DT2 provides a more various and distinct description about Cantonese natural discourse.