---
title: "Lexical, Prosodic, and Syntactic Cues for — Jurafsky 1998"
description: "The paper examines how short feedback utterances in conversation, such as yeah , uh-huh and okay , can be told apart by their dialog act (DA) function."
authors: ["Daniel Jurafsky", "Elizabeth Shriberg", "Barbara Fox", "Traci Curl"]
year: 1998
venue: "Discourse Relations and Discourse Markers"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/W98-0319/"
licence: "CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (ACL Anthology, before 2016)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/papers/jurafsky-1998-lexical-prosodic-syntactic-cues-dialog/"
---
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# Lexical, Prosodic, and Syntactic Cues for Dialog Acts

**Authors:** [Daniel Jurafsky](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/authors/daniel-jurafsky/), [Elizabeth Shriberg](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/authors/elizabeth-shriberg/), Barbara Fox, Traci Curl · **Year:** 1998 · **Venue:** Discourse Relations and Discourse Markers · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (ACL Anthology, before 2016)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/W98-0319/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/W98-0319.pdf) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W3087962330)

**Citations:** 105 citations (openalex-snapshot · 2026-10-14) · [27](#cited-by) in our library, of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary
The paper examines how short feedback utterances in conversation, such as *yeah*, *uh-huh* and *okay*, can be told apart by their dialog act (DA) function. The acts studied are continuers, incipient speakership, agreements, yes-answers and assessments. The data come from the Switchboard (SWBD) corpus of telephone conversations, which was hand-annotated with the SWBD-DAMSL tagset, an adaptation of DAMSL. The authors compare which words realize each act, listen to recordings of selected utterances to find prosodic differences, and analyze the grammatical shape of assessments.

The word distributions differ clearly across acts, even though *yeah* is highly ambiguous. For some acts, prosody and timing settle cases the words leave open: duration, pitch, loudness, pauses, and whether one utterance runs straight into the next. Assessments follow a very narrow pattern, which leads the authors to propose a per-act "microsyntax". The work was a preliminary study within the WS97 Johns Hopkins project. It informs automatic DA recognition for speech recognition and understanding systems.

## Key points
- **Annotation:** Seven annotators tagged 1155 SWBD conversations (about 205,000 utterances) with SWBD-DAMSL.
  - The 220 tag combinations were later merged into 42 classes.
  - Inter-annotator agreement was 84% (kappa .80).
- **Continuers vs. floor-taking:** *Uh-huh* is roughly twice as likely as *yeah* to act as a continuer. *Yeah* is about three times as likely to be used for taking the floor.
  - About 41% of backchannel *yeah* tokens take the floor.
  - About 11% of backchannel *uh-huh* tokens do so.
- **Yes-answers and agreements:** 86% of yes-answers contain *yes*, *yeah* or *yep*. *Uh-huh* appears in only 4% of agreements, while *exactly* and *that's right* signal agreement unambiguously.
- **Prosody:** Compared with agreements, continuers tend to be shorter, lower in pitch, flatter and quieter. A long pause before an utterance, or the absence of one ("latching"), can change how it is interpreted.
- **Assessments:** Of 1150 assessments with an overt subject, 80% use *that* as the subject. Intensifiers occur in only 2% of cases (just *really* and *pretty*), and the adjectives come from a small closed set (*great*, *good*, *nice*, …).

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

Fields: [Linguistics & languages](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/shelves/linguistics/)

Topics: [Speech act theory](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/topics/speech-act-theory/)

## Cited by

Cited by

27 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 3 of them have a page here, 24 not yet.

- [Multi-level Dialogue Act Tags](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/clark-2004-multi-level-dialogue-act-tags/)
- [Classifying Dialogue Acts in Multi-party Live Chats](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/kim-2012-classifying-dialogue-acts-multi-party/)
- [Dialogue Act Modeling for Automatic Tagging and Recognition of Conversational Speech](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/prag-2000-stolcke-dialogue-act-modeling-automatic-tagging/)

## Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@inproceedings{jurafsky1998lexical,
  title = {{Lexical, Prosodic, and Syntactic Cues for Dialog Acts}},
  author = {Jurafsky, Daniel and Shriberg, Elizabeth and Fox, Barbara and Curl, Traci},
  booktitle = {Discourse Relations and Discourse Markers},
  year = {1998},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/W98-0319/}
}
```

- [← previous Lexical marking of discourse relations - some experimental findings](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/soria-1998-lexical-marking-discourse-relations-some/)
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## References

28 references, 1 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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