From connective to interpersonal functions: variation of discourse marker use in French, English and Polish

Crible, Ludivine;Degand, Liesbeth;Grzech, Karolina
(2017) 5th International Conference on Discourse Markers in the Romance Languages (DisRom 2017) — Location: Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium (8.November.2017)

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  • Crible, LudivineUCLouvain
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  • Degand, LiesbethUCLouvain
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  • Grzech, Karolina
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Abstract
Discourse markers (henceforth DMs), i.e. syntactically optional expressions performing pragmatic functions related to “bracket[ing] units of talk” (Schiffrin 1987), are the focus of a very rich field of study, investigating their many forms and functions in various languages. However, they are very rarely studied onomasiologically (i.e. aiming at a large coverage of the DM category rather than a closed-list approach), especially not in spoken multilingual data, as opposed to the bulk of contrastive case studies. This presentation aims to address this gap in the literature by analyzing the variation in use and functions of a broad bottom-up selection of DMs across three languages from different typological families, namely French (Romance), English (Germanic) and Polish (Slavic). Such an endeavor requires not only to overcome issues of definition and delimitation of the DM category, accounting for the diversity of their forms in different languages through an operational tertium comparationis (Krzeszowski 1981), but also to design an annotation model encompassing their full functional spectrum, in the perspective of spoken discourse analysis. Our study follows a corpus-based methodology based on Crible & Degand’s (in press) multilingual annotation scheme for functions of (spoken) discourse markers. The functional taxonomy distinguishes between four domains (ideational, rhetorical, sequential, interpersonal) and eleven functions (e.g. cause, contrast, topic-shift). In this model (revised from Crible’s 2017 original taxonomy), each function can, in principle, express each of the four domains: for instance, a contrastive relation can be ideational (connect objective facts), rhetorical (connect subjective arguments), sequential (target the structure of topics and turns) or interpersonal (manage the speaker-hearer relationship). This taxonomy with two independent levels has been applied to spoken unplanned dialogues in French (LOCAS-F corpus, Degand et al. 2014), English (ICE-GB corpus, Nelson et al. 2002) and Polish (Pęzik 2015). A sample of ca. 30 minutes (between 5000 and 6000 words) has been selected from these resources for each language. Discourse markers were identified in a bottom-up approach, without any closed list of pre-selected items, following a broad definition: any expression which is syntactically optional, has a (partly) procedural meaning and performs a discourse-level pragmatic function was selected. The items were then manually annotated according to the functional classification introduced above. The French data was double-coded for the purpose of inter-annotator agreement, so as to insure reliable results. Annotations were then extracted for contrastive analyses of distribution and variation of DMs and their functions. The data and annotation scheme will be briefly presented, focusing on challenges of multilingual annotation. We will then report on quantitative findings of the distribution of domains and functions across French, English and Polish conversations, looking for crosslinguistic differences and similarities in the functions DMs can express in each language, both from a categorical and a DM-specific point of view. For instance, we will compare three semantically similar DMs: English you know, French tu vois and Polish wiesz, demonstrating that semantic equivalence of DMs attested in different languages does not necessarily lead to functional and distributional similarities between them.
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Crible, L., Degand, L., & Grzech, K. (2017). From connective to interpersonal functions: variation of discourse marker use in French, English and Polish. 5th International Conference on Discourse Markers in the Romance Languages (DisRom 2017), Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/241741