Emplois sous-spécifiés des marqueurs discursifs et / and : stratégie (inter)subjective et variation en genre
(2018) Cahiers du FoReLL — Vol. ?, p. ? (2018)
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- This paper provides a pilot study on the use of the connective and and its French equivalent et. It sets out to show that the meaning variation of the connective is strongly affected by genre variation: non-additive uses are typical of spontaneous settings of communication, where the speaker is under high planning pressure and attends to their own needs rather than to the hearer’s. The analysis is based on the senses of and / et as they were manually annotated on a comparable corpus of spoken English and French, following a functional taxonomy distinguishing between, for instance, “addition”, “contrast”, “topic-shift” etc. as potential senses of connectives (and other discourse markers, cf. Footnote 1 above). The results show that and / et are most multifunctional (i.e. show the broadest functional spectrum) in English interviews and French conversations, while the basic additive meaning is most frequent in political speeches (about 80% in the two languages), which tends to support the hypothesis that weak uses of connectives are a strategy of speaker economy. However, the data also suggests that, in interactive dialogues, additional cues such as “disfluencies” (e.g. pauses, fillers) are available to the hearer in the direct co-text of the connectives, which might be considered as hearer-oriented strategy whereby co-occurrence compensates for the weak instruction and strengthens the interpretation process.
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Crible, L. (2018). Emplois sous-spécifiés des marqueurs discursifs et / and : stratégie (inter)subjective et variation en genre. Cahiers du FoReLL, ?, ? https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/99701 (Original work published 2018)