The Haifa Corpus of Spoken Hebrew

Yael Maschler

University of Haifa

The Haifa Corpus of Spoken Hebrew includes audio recordings of informal spontaneous Hebrew interactions between students, their friends and relatives, collected during the years 1986-2018. Most interactions took place face-to-face; there are 4 phone conversations. The corpus consists of 266 conversations ranging in length from 1 to 9 minutes each, 2-5 participants per interaction, among 770 different interlocutors, comprising over 12 hours of talk (approximately 735 minutes).

Please cite the corpus in the following manner:

Maschler, Yael, Polak-Yitzhaki, Hilla, Fishman, Stav, Miller Shapiro, Carmit, Goretsky, Netanel, Aghion, Gallith, & Fofliger, Ophir. 2021. The Haifa Corpus of Spoken Hebrew.

ובעברית:

משלר, יעל, פולק-יצחקי, הלה, פישמן, סתו, מילר שפירו כרמית, גורצקי, נתנאל, אגיון, גלית, ופופליגר, אופיר. 2021. קורפוס השיח העברי הדבור של אוניברסיטת חיפה.

The Haifa Corpus of Spoken Hebrew also includes 80 interactions recorded and transcribed by Dr. Gonen Dori-Hacohen, altogether 390 minutes of talk between hosts and callers, which took place on three different call-in radio programs on the two leading public stations in Israel. More information about this corpus can be found in Dori-Hacohen (2012). (Please note that transcription (see below) of the radiophonic data is far less accurate). 

Transcription Conventions

Transcription basically follows Chafe (1994), as sometimes adapted by Du Bois et al. (1992) and Du Bois (2012), with a few additions. 

Each line denotes an intonation unit (Chafe 1994)

..   –  perceptible pause of less than 0.1 second

…   –  average pause (0.1 ≤ x < 1.0 seconds)

….  –  pause (1.0 ≤ x < 1.5 seconds)

…. – pause (1.5 ≤ x < 2.0 seconds)

 (3.56) – measured pause of 3.56 seconds

, – comma at end of line – continuing intonation (‘more to come’)

. – period at end of line – sentence-final falling intonation

? – question mark at end of line – sentence-final ‘appeal intonation’ 

?, – question mark followed by comma – ‘continuing appeal’ intonation 

! – exclamation mark at end of line – sentence final exclamatory intonation

ø – lack of punctuation at end of line – a fragmentary intonation unit, one which never reached completion.  

— two hyphens – elongation of preceding sound

underlined syllable – primary stress of intonation unit

boldfaced syllable – secondary stress of intonation unit

@ – a burst of laughter (each additional @ symbol denotes an additional burst)

 square bracket to the left of two consecutive lines indicates

 beginning of overlapping speech, two speakers talking at once

alignment such that the right of the top line 

 is placed over the left of the bottom line indicates latching, no interturn pause

Musical notation as necessary, e.g.: f – forte (loud), ff – fortissimo (very loud),  p – piano (soft), pp – pianissimo (very soft), cresc – crescendo (progressively louder), 

dim – diminuendo (progressively softer), acc – accelerando (progressively faster), ritard – ritardando (progressively slower), staccato – (very short), sfz – sforzando (a strong, sudden accent).  

[in square brackets] – broad phonetic transcription of preceding utterance.

{in curly brackets} – transcriber’s comments 

' – uninverted quotation mark indicates the glottal stop phoneme.

’ – inverted quotation mark in a transliterated word indicates an elided form (e.g., 'an’lo instead of 'ani lo (lit. ‘I not’, ‘I don’t’ / ‘I’m not’))

– one hyphen – bound-morpheme boundary

/words within slashes/ indicate uncertain transcription

Bibliography

Chafe, Wallace. 1994. Discourse, Consciousness, and Time. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Dori-Hacohen, Gonen. 2012. Types of interaction on Israeli radio phone-in programs and the public sphere. Javnost-The public 19(3): 21–40.

Du Bois, John W. 2012. Representing discourse. Linguistics Department, University of California at Santa Barbara (Fall 2012 version).  http://www.linguistics.ucsb.edu/projects/transcription/representing

Du Bois, John W., Cumming Susanna, Schuetze-Coburn Stephan, & Danae Paolino. 1992. Discourse Transcription: Santa Barbara Papers in Linguistics, vol. 4. Santa Barbara: Department of Linguistics, University of California, Santa Barbara.