Turn Body

The turn body itself contains all audible events such as lexical units and noise, and in addition syntactic labels and comments.


Three points have to be considered concerning the format of the turn body:

1. ASCII code:
   The transliteration is encoded in 7-bit ASCII. Letters like umlauts and `ß' are substituted by TEX notations. For the delivery format the TEX notation is again converted into ISO.

2. Separation of elements:
   Turn elements are preceded and followed by blank spaces. The only exception can be found with line breaks, as these follow immediately after the respective turn element.

3. Word separation:
   Words are not separated; the respective word will always move to the next line.

If a turn contains a lexical unit it must be concluded with a punctuation mark like a period or a question mark or with the turn break label <*T>t. After the last punctuation mark it is only allowed to transliterate technical noise or non-verbal articulatory production. The turn break label must be the final turn unit, though. If a turn contains no lexical unit punctuation marks aren't used, either. Nevertheless the ear impression might justify a turn break label.


A turn must contain at least one of the following elements:

• a lexical unit

• a hesitation

• the symbol for incomprehensible utterances: <%>