In this study, we propose a conversation-analytic annotation scheme for turn-taking behavior in multi-party conversations. The annotation scheme is motivated by a proposal of a proper model of turn-taking incorporating various ideas developed in the literature of conversation analysis. Our annotation consists of two sets of tags: the beginning and the ending type of the utterance. Focusing on the ending-type tags, in some cases combined with the beginning-type tags, we emphasize the importance of the distinction among four selection types: i) selecting other participant as next speaker, ii) not selecting next speaker but followed by a switch of the speakership, iii) not selecting next speaker and followed by a continuation of the speakership, and iv)being inside a multi-unit turn. Based on the annotation of Japanese multi-party conversations, we analyze how syntactic and prosodic features of utterances vary across the four selection types. The results show that the above four-way distinction is essential to account for the distributions of the syntactic and prosodic features, suggesting the insufficiency of previous turn-taking models that do not consider the distinction between i) and ii) or between ii) or iii).

The National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics, Japan (NINJAL, Japan), has developed several types of corpora. For each corpus NINJAL provided an online search environment, ‘Chunagon’, which is a morphological-information-annotation-based concordance system made publicly available in 2011. NINJAL has now provided a skewer-search system ‘Kotonoha’ based on the ‘Chunagon’ systems. This system enables querying of multiple corpora by certain categories, such as register type and period.