Key word analysis of discourses in Slovene speech : differences and similarities

Abstract

One of the aspects of speech that remains under-researched is the internal variety of speech, i.e. the differences and similarities between different types of speech. This paper aims to contribute to this research by making the comparison between different discourses of Slovene spontaneous speech, focusing on the use of vocabulary. The key word analysis (Scott, 1997), conducted on a million‑word corpus of spoken Slovene, was used to identify lexical items and groups of lexical items typical of a particular spoken discourse, or common to different types of spoken discourse. The results indicate that the presence or absence of a particular word class in the key word list can be a good indicator of a type of spoken discourse, or discourses.