The Extended IPA has adopted bracket notation from conventions transcribing discourse. Parentheses are used to indicate
mouthing (silent articulation), as in the common silent sign to hush . Parentheses are also used to indicate silent pauses, for example (...); the length of the pause may be indicated, as in (2.3 sec). A very short (.) may be used to indicate an absence of co-articulation between adjacent segments, for instance rather than . Double parentheses indicate that transcription is uncertain because of extraneous noise or speech, as when one person talks over another. As much detail as possible may be included, as in ⸨2 syll.⸩ or ⸨2σ⸩ for two obscured syllables. This is also IPA usage. Sometimes the obscuring noise will be indicated instead, as in ⸨cough⸩ or ⸨knock⸩, as in the illustrative transcription below; this notation may be used for extraneous noise that does not obscure speech, but which the transcriber nonetheless wishes to notate (e.g. because someone says 'excuse me' after coughing, or verbally responds to the knock on the door, and the noise is thus required to understand the speech). In the extIPA, indistinguishable/unidentifiable sounds are circled rather than placed in single parentheses as in IPA. An empty circle, ◯, is used for an indeterminate segment, ◯ σ an indeterminate syllable, Ⓒ a segment identifiable only as a consonant, etc. Full capital letters, such as C in Ⓒ, are used as
wild-cards for certain categories of sounds, and may combine with IPA and extIPA diacritics. For example, ◯ indicates an undetermined or indeterminate voiceless plosive. Regular IPA and extIPA letters may also be circled to indicate that their identification is uncertain. For example, ⓚ indicates that the segment is judged to probably be . This is effectively a
copy-edit mark, and may be elongated into an oval for longer strings of symbols. This was illustrated in the 1997 edition of the chart, where the circle was typeset as ( ̲̅) and longer strings as e.g. (a̲̅a̲̅a̲̅). There is no way to typeset this in Unicode that does not require spurious characters between the letters (as here), but for data storage it may be indicated with an unused set of brackets, such as ⦇aaa⦈ or ⸦aaa⸧. Curly brackets with Italian musical terms are used for phonation and prosodic notation, such as {{IPA|[{
falsetto ˈhɛlp
falsetto}]}} and terms for the
tempo and
dynamics of connected speech. These are subscripted within a {curly brace} notation to indicate that they are comments on the intervening text. The
VoQS conventions use similar notation for voice quality. These may be combined, for example with VoQS for 'falsetto': :{
allegro I {F {𝆏 didn't 𝆏} know that F}
allegro} or :{{IPA|[{
allegro ə {F {𝆏 dɪn 𝆏} nəʊ ðæʔ F}
allegro}]}} ==Chart==