Another way to get the annotations of both tiers onto one tier, is to use Tier > Merge Tiers...Classic. This method is somewhat simplified.

In the dialog window select the two tiers to merge and click Next. Enter a name for the new tier and select the desired tier type. Now select Concatenate the values of overlapping annotations and click Finish to create the new tier. Now all annotations of the original tiers are on the new tier. Overlapping annotations are merged to one annotation. The merged annotations begins where the first of the overlapping annotations begins and ends where the last one ends. The values of the overlapping annotations are concatenated.

When checking the option Only process if the overlapping annotations have the same value, ELAN only merges annotations that have the same value. In this case, the values of both annotations are not concatenated, so the created annotation contains the value only once. Optionally you can specify the value the merging annotations should have.

Merging tiers can also be used to get some time statistics of the combination of two tiers. Again, select Tier > Merge Tiers..., select the two tiers to merge and click Next. After entering a name for the new tier and selecting the desired tier type, select Set the duration over the overlap as the annotation's value and the desired time format. Finally click Finish. Overlapping annotations are merged and the annotation's value is the total duration of the overlapping annotations. (More about annotations statistics can be found in the section called “Annotations Statistics”.)

As a final example, consider an audio recognizer (see the section called “Creating a tier using the Silence Recognizer”) creating not one but multiple tiers. If you want to put the annotations of those tiers on one tier, you could use the Merge Tiers... option to achieve this.