Ambiguity, multifunctionality and underspecification: coming to terms with French et, mais, donc

Discourse markers, i.e. “sequentially dependent elements which bracket units of talk” (Schiffrin 1987: 31), are the focus of an abundant research field investigating the many aspects of their behavior. These pragmatic expressions such as mais, donc, enfin, tu vois or alors in French, are particularly fascinating from the perspective of their polyfunctionality, which has been explained and modeled under several different theoretical frameworks (see Fischer 2006 for an overview). These approaches, corpus-based or otherwise, provide different, partially overlapping accounts of the many dimensions of meaning which discourse markers can express. Nonetheless, they all converge in acknowledging the challenge of sense disambiguation in authentic data. This ambiguity of discourse markers can relate either to their inherent polysemy, their use in conversational speech where new meanings tend to arise, or to a certain degree of semantic “bleaching” (Bolinger 1977) in a given context. In this presentation, I intend to disentangle some theoretical notions related to the meaning-in-context of discourse markers, with an exemplary analysis of French et ‘and’, mais ‘but’ and donc ‘so’ in spoken language. The three high-frequency discourse markers presently under scrutiny have been studied extensively from the viewpoint of polysemy (e.g. Anscombre & Ducrot 1997 on mais), monosemy with contextual enrichment (e.g. de Saussure & Sthioul 2002 on et) or “multidimensionality” in the sense of Bunt (2011), that is, projecting the same core meaning across different linguistic levels or dimensions (Hansen 1997 on donc). These notions target general principles accounting for semantic-pragmatic variation. To complement these general principles, I propose to focus on three functional mechanisms which are somewhat less studied and which can be applied to specific occurrences in context: ambiguity, understood here as vague or bleached meaning; polyfunctionality, in the case of two or more simultaneous meanings being jointly expressed by one discourse marker; underspecification, that is, when a lexeme is expressing a meaning which is not fully encoded in its semantics. I would like to argue that French et, mais and donc are mostly concerned with the latter two, namely polyfunctionality and underspecification, although it is necessary to define all three notions in order to understand the full picture and different possible configurations. This study reports on two sets of results. First, quantitative findings will be discussed as to compare the proportions in which et, mais and donc are produced in ambiguous, multifunctional and/or underspecified ways in different spoken registers (e.g. conversation, interviews, news). These results are based on the functional annotation of discourse markers in the DisFrEn dataset, where each item is assigned one (or two) domain(s) (viz. ideational, rhetorical, sequential, interpersonal) and one (or two) function(s) (e.g. cause, contrast, topic change) (Crible 2017). Secondly, qualitative analysis of examples of et, mais and donc will shed more light on the pragmatic versatility of these expressions. While only partial, the semantic-pragmatic picture described in this analysis should come to terms with the theoretical overlap between ambiguity, multifunctionality and underspecification on the basis of authentic language in use.