Towards a constructionist approach to discourse markers and the construal of underspecified pragmatic meaning

Early on in Construction Grammar (CxG), it was stated that constructions affect all linguistic levels and that CxG must also account for pragmatic information (Fillmore et al. 1988). Taking up this assumption and following recent works (e.g. Fried & Östman 2005; Nikiforidou & Fischer 2015; Aijmer 2016), I present the first steps of a systematic CxG approach to discourse markers (DMs), i.e. syntactically optional yet frequent pragmatic operators building up the structure and coherence of a text, such as and, so, well etc. Several characteristics of the DM category make them particularly suited to be analyzed as constructions, in cognitive-CxG terms (Goldberg 2006): • DMs are highly sensitive to register in frequency, types and functions; • they can express different senses depending on their situational and structural context; • they tend to co-occur with other DMs (e.g. and yet, but anyway) as well as other discourse-level elements such as interjections, disfluencies, sentence adverbials, modal particles, temporal phrases or coreference chains; • they are very frequent in natural language, including in specific structural configurations (e.g. French donc euh ‘so uh’ as turn-closure, Degand 2014). Fischer (2006, 2010) suggests to describe the broad functional spectrum of discourse markers in terms of frames (register constraints), constructions (structural configurations) and invariant meanings (contribution of the individual DM). This proposal is particularly relevant to the study of underspecified DMs, i.e. cases where the DM expresses a sense which is not fully encoded in its semantics (e.g. and signalling a contrastive relation). By converging the role of register, position and co-occurrence, I intend to show how CxG can account for underspecified uses of high-frequency DMs, as they were annotated in a comparable corpus of spoken English and French (Crible 2017). In doing so, the mutual relationship between a DM and its co(n)text will be elucidated, teasing out their respective contributions to the construal of pragmatic meaning and coming to terms with the theoretical overlap between polysemy, multifunctionality and underspecification.