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Article published In: International Journal of Corpus Linguistics
Vol. 22:2 (2017) ► pp.242–269

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Discourse markers and (dis)fluency in English and French

Variation and combination in the DisFrEn corpus

 | Université catholique de Louvain
Published online: 16 October 2017
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https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.22.2.04cri
Abstract
While discourse markers (DMs) and (dis)fluency have been extensively studied in the past as separate phenomena, corpus-based research combining large-scale yet fine-grained annotations of both categories has, however, never been carried out before. Integrating these two levels of analysis, while methodologically challenging, is not only innovative but also highly relevant to the investigation of spoken discourse in general and form-meaning patterns in particular. The aim of this paper is to provide corpus-based evidence of the register-sensitivity of DMs and other disfluencies (e.g. pauses, repetitions) and of their tendency to combine in recurrent clusters. These claims are supported by quantitative findings on the variation and combination of DMs with other (dis)fluency devices in DisFrEn, a richly annotated and comparable English-French corpus representative of eight different interaction settings. The analysis uncovers the prominent place of DMs within (dis)fluency and meaningful association patterns between forms and functions, in a usage-based approach to meaning-in-context.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Discourse markers and (dis)fluency in corpus linguistics
    • 2.1Corpora annotated with DM information
      • 2.1.1Definition of DMs
      • 2.1.2Crosslinguistic research on DMs: From case studies to full categories
      • 2.1.3Annotating the functions of discourse markers
    • 2.2Corpora annotated with (dis)fluency information
      • 2.2.1Brief overview of (dis)fluency annotation frameworks
      • 2.2.2Discourse markers in previous approaches to (dis)fluency
    • 2.3A usage-based approach to the integration of DMs and (dis)fluency
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Dataset construction
    • 3.2Annotation schemes: A bottom-up approach to corpus annotation
      • 3.2.1Discourse markers: Multi-layered annotation
      • 3.2.2(Dis)fluency: Word-level tagging
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Quantitative analysis: Variation of DMs and fluencemes
    • 4.2Qualitative analysis: Usage-based schemata of forms and functions
  • 5.Summary and discussion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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