Syntagma and segmentation of spontaneous speech

The article presents a review of Russian linguistic papers on syntagma and foreign papers that focus on semantic and prosodic segmentation of speech. The definitions of the term «syntagma» given in numerous Russian-language researches turn out to be vague; there are no common and universally applicable criteria for dividing a speech signal into syntagmas; the fact that syntactic and prosodic units do not necessarily coincide in spontaneous speech contradicts the very idea of syntagma. According to the research results presented in the paper, the term «syntagma» cannot be used for the description of the process of spoken word recognition, as syntagma in its traditional for Russian linguistics interpretation cannot be considered a unit of speech segmentation. For the moment, the terms «elementary discourse unit» and «interpausal interval», if used together, seem to be the most convenient ones for showing the mismatch between the units of speech production and acoustic realization.