From context to functions and back again: Disambiguating pragmatic uses of discourse markers

Bolly, Catherine;Crible, Ludivine
(2015) 14th International Pragmatics Conference (IPra), Panel session “Anchoring utterances in co(n)text, argumentation, common ground” — Location: Antwerp (26.July.2015)

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  • Bolly, CatherineUCLouvain
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  • Crible, LudivineUCLouvain
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Abstract
Some authors (e.g. Hansen 2006) claim that Discourse Markers (DMs) function as cues to situate upcoming speech into the listener’s mental representation of ongoing discourse, either by signaling a semantic relation between the connected units (Ex. 1), by planning and structuring discourse (Ex. 2), or by managing the interactional and intersubjective dimension of communication (Ex. 3). In this perspective, DMs can be seen as “lexical markers of common ground” (Fetzer & Fischer 2007), since they form explicit contextualization cues which instruct the listener on how to retrieve and re-construct speaker-intended meaning. In particular, their procedural meaning of “inference facilitators” creates a bridge between an utterance and its cognitive context (Gonzalez 2005). (1) “on ne sait pas faire ce qu’on veut / donc on doit / on doit s’adapter” we can’t do what we want / so we have to / we have to adapt (VALIBEL; Corpage corpus; 2012; spk: ageNM1) (2) “je vais commencer par ma première question // euh // ben / d’après…” I will start with my first question // uh // well / according to… (VALIBEL; Corpage corpus; 2012; spk: ageFB0) (3) “ce n’était pas le / le / le grand bonheur si tu veux” it wasn’t the / the / the happiest time if you will (VALIBEL; Corpage corpus; 2012; spk: ageNM1) Our corpus-based study reports the methods and results of two joint endeavours related to the parameter and functional description of DMs in spoken French (corpora: CLAPI, CorpAGEst, VALIBEL). The first research project (MDMA Working Group, see Bolly et al. 2014) aimed at reaching feature-based criteria for the identification of DMs by disambiguating the uses of DM candidates, through cotextual and surface features mainly (e.g. position, co-occurrence) as well as some contextual interpretation (e.g. procedural vs. conceptual meaning). The second research focuses on the functional annotation of DMs based on operational categories validated over languages and modalities (see Crible & Bolly (submitted)). Here, context is extended to situational considerations, including in-depth pragmatic interpretation and multimodal features (prosody, gestures). In both projects, emphasis is put on the constant relation between a DM occurrence and its co(n)text, be it to identify the relevant factors that help classify an item as discursive or non-discursive, or to select the appropriate function the DM is performing in its particular utterance, among the range of “meaning potentials” (Aijmer 2013) it can convey. We will first show that, despite the great grammatical diversity of the DM class, recurrent patterns of features can be revealed through multivariate analysis of several parameters annotated by four different coders. These results confirm that the distinction between DMs and their non-discursive forms is motivated by syntactic (position, mobility) and semantic (procedurality, prototypical meaning) criteria. Secondly, the functional annotation applied to these “confirmed” DMs reveals in its turn how DMs relate to their (extra)linguistic context by signaling a number of discourse relations and/or structural, metadiscursive and interpersonal functions. We claim that our revised taxonomy of DM functions allows for an operational annotation of pragmatic features, thus providing a suitable model to account for the different domains covered by DMs in speech. To sum up, our contribution will provide a comprehensive view on the role of DMs as key signals of the interactive process of co-building interpretation, by highlighting the constant back-and-forth between utterance and context.
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Bolly, C., & Crible, L. (2015). From context to functions and back again: Disambiguating pragmatic uses of discourse markers. 14th International Pragmatics Conference (IPra), Panel session “Anchoring utterances in co(n)text, argumentation, common ground”, Antwerp. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/190729