Common Words in Spoken Dialogues

There are a number of words that are common in spoken dialogues that do not occur in written forms. This section discusses how such words should be transcribed. Where possible, we use the spelling from Quirk et al. (1985).

Filled Pauses Filled pauses are very common in natural dialogue. There seem to be two types, ones that sound like "uh" and ones that sound like "um". The endings of these words are often prolonged, thus tempting transcribers to label it is "ummm". Rather, these words should be classified as either "um" or "uh", and transcribed as such. We also include "er", which is more common in British accents. Note that the filled-pauses should never be transcribed as partial words.

um	Filled pause.
uh	Filled pause.
er	Filled pause. More common in British English.

Acknowledgments

The following is a list of commonly occurring acknowledgments, and how they should be spelt.

okay	Agreement. Speakers will often produce variants of this, such as "kay", "mkay", "umkay". All of these variants should be spelt as "okay".
uh-huh	Agreement.
uh-hm	Agreement.
mm-hm	Agreement.
uh-uh	Disagreement.
mm	Agreement, stalling for time
huh	Request for clarification. Puzzlement.
hm	Stalling for time.
nah	Informal version of "no".
nope	Informal version of "no".
a-ha	Interjection denoting surprise, as in "aha< I found it", rather than "uh-huh" as an acknowledgement ha Interjection, similar to "aha".
oh	Surprise. ooh As in "ooh, that's gross."
yeah	Informal version of "yes"
yep	Informal version of "yes"

Contractions

Contractions, that are common, should be written as one word. The following is a list of common contraction endings. Note that there can often be an ambiguity as to whether the speaker was saying the words as one or as two individual words, especially since words are often blurred together. If in doubt, annotate the word pair as two separate words, spelling out the second in full.

'll	for "will"
've	for "have"
n't	for "not"
're	for "are"
's	for "is"

All other contractions are left to the transcriber's discretion as to whether they should be transcribed as one word or two.
Word Pairs There are some word pairs that are so altered (in pronounciation) that they seem to be one lexical item. Such pairs can be transcribed as single words. Below, we give some common word pairs.

lemme	for "let me"
wanna	for "want to"
gonna	for "going to"
gotta	for "going to"

Extracted from PostScript by R. Paul McCarty 2001/07/30