The Guidelines presented in this document are concerned with the symbolic representation of speech in written form. The expression spoken texts refers in this context to a symbolic representation of speech using conventional spelling enriched with a set of conventions to represent different kinds of information which are present in the spoken form but cannot be conveyed by means of the normal spelling conventions. It is assumed that speech transcribed thus has been previously recorded and that the sound wave is available and related in some way to the symbolic representation.
The transcription of spoken language requires the representation of a series of events that take place simultaneously with the production of speech, especially when speech is unprepared; these events are transcribed by means of different conventions and different tags are used to describe them. The discussion in this chapter will concentrate on the events themselves and will not deal with the tags that can be used for descriptive purposes during the process of annotation.
The present Guidelines are a preliminary answer to the questions put forward by Sinclair (1993:64-65):