Degand, Liesbeth
[UCL]
The topic of this presentation is methodological. It reports on an ongoing (manual) annotation experiment of discourse markers (DMs) in spontaneous spoken French data. We use the term “potential DM” to refer to those linguistic expressions that can, in one context or another, fulfill a DM function, i.e. be used at either of the following “levels” or “domains”: “the sequential structure of the dialogue, the turn-taking system, speech management, interpersonal management, the topic structure, and participation frameworks” (Fischer 2006, 9). For example, tu vois is defined as a potential DM because it occurs in contexts where it serves to manage the relationship between speaker and hearer (1), although in other contexts it does not (2). (1) mais il viendra te poser des questions sur euh genre / tu vois où tes parents sont nés euh / (2) c'était chouette parce que j'avais jamais été et tu vois tous les instruments / Starting from the common observation that there is no recognized closed class of discourse markers, the hypothesis underlying our annotation experiment is that the analysis of the distributional constraints imposed on specific markers should uncover reliable features for the categorization of DMs. We proceeded in three steps: (i) using a very broad definition of DMs; i.e. “any element of language that plays a role in the organization of discourse” (Vincent 2005: 189), three analysts identified all potential DMs in an 800 words transcript; (ii) all types found were then extracted from a balanced 10.000 words corpus; and (iii) analyzed according to more than 20 features (syntax, semantics, collocation, …). I will present the first results of the feature analysis (most relevant, reliable, useful ones).
Bibliographic reference |
Degand, Liesbeth. Identification of potential discourse markers in spoken French.International Workshop on Discourse Annotation (Utrecht, 21/06/2013). |
Permanent URL |
http://hdl.handle.net/2078.1/137211 |