Spoken discourse segmentation and the paradox of discourse markers.

Degand, Liesbeth [UCL]

In this talk I will give an overview of my work on spoken discourse segmentation and on discourse markers in order to explore further research avenues about what is so specific about the discourse level, i.e. to make progress in investigating why discourse is a crucial notion for understanding human communication (Sanders & Spooren, 2007), even more whether it is the case that “Discourse is what makes us human” (Graesser, Millis, and Zwaan, 1997). The paradox of discourse markers On the level of the sentence (syntax and semantics), DMs are optional, they are not even considered as a (morpho-)syntactic category, but in human communication they are obligatory (in the sense of Diewald 2011). Thus, human communication (in any context) is not possible without DMs. It follows that the study of DMs should learn us more about the underlying cognitive and functional principles of human communication, i.e. as indices of fundamental cognitive processing during (spoken) language production. The iconoclastic idea I would like to raise is: Are DMs indices of egocentricity in language, i.e. as speaker-oriented traces of discourse planning rather than as hearer-oriented signals as they are mainly conceived as in (written) discourse processing? How could this question be empirically and experimentally investigated? Basic Discourse Units Discourse segmentation in units is a crucial process in order to understand discourse production and comprehension. We developed a method for segmenting spoken discourse in Basic Discourse Units (BDUs), based on the interaction between syntactic units (dependency clauses) and prosodic units (major intonation units). BDUs result from the coincidence of syntactic and prosodic boundaries, corresponding to distinct but complementary linguistic encodings. This mapping gives rise to different types of discourse units (congruent, syntax-bound, intonation-bound, regulatory) (Degand & Simon 2009a, Simon & Degand, 2011). Thus, our claim is that the prosody-syntax interface gives rise to a distinct discursive level of analysis contributing to the unfolding (linear) discourse, e.g. in the form of different discursive strategies (Degand & Simon, 2009b; Martin, Degand, & Simon 2014). The BDU segmentation has been applied to a corpus of spoken French, LOCAS-F (Degand, Martin & Simon, 2014; Degand & Simon, in prep.) comprising 14 different speech situations (political debate, interview, spontaneous conversation, conference, …). The data is now available to explore whether these BDUs have cognitive validity in production and/or comprehension. Here too, methodological feedback is welcome. References Degand, L. & Simon, A.C. (2009a). On identifying basic discourse units in speech: theoretical and empirical issues. Discours 4 (online-journal). [available online at URL: http://discours.revues.org/index54.html] Degand, L. & Simon, Anne Catherine (2009b). Mapping prosody and syntax as a strategic choice. Dagmar Barth-Weingarten, Nicole Dehé, and Anne Wichmann (eds). Where Prosody Meets Pragmatics. Bangalore: Emerald. [Studies in Pragmatics, Volume 8], 79-105. Degand, Liesbeth, Laurence J. Martin, and Anne-Catherine Simon. 2014. “Unités discursives de base et leur périphérie gauche dans LOCAS-F, un corpus oral multigenres annoté.” In CMLF 2014 - 4ème Congrès Mondial de Linguistique Française 2014, edited by EDP Sciences. Berlin, Allemagne. Diewald, Gabriele. 2011. “Pragmaticalization (defined) as Grammaticalization of Discourse Functions.” Linguistics 49 (2): 365–90. doi:doi: 10.1515/LING.2011.011. Graesser, Arthur C, Keith K. Millis, and Rolf A. Zwaan. 1997. “Discourse Comprehension.” Annual Review of Psychology 48: 163–89. doi:10.1146/annurev.psych.48.1.163. Martin, Laurence J., Degand, Liesbeth & Simon, Anne Catherine. (2014). Forme et fonction de la périphérie gauche dans un corpus oral multigenres annoté. Corpus 13. 243-265. [available on-line : http://corpus.revues.org/2154] Sanders, Ted, and Wilbert Spooren. 2007. “Discourse and Text Structure.” In Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, D. Geeraerts & H. Cuykens, 916–43. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Simon, Anne Catherine & Degand, Liesbeth (2011). L’analyse en unités discursives de base : pourquoi et comment ? Langue française 170, 45-59.