Discourse markers and regional variation in French

This chapter examines several discourse markers (DMs) which are common in spontaneous Quebec French and which derive from verbs of perception/cognition (coudon ‘hey, by the way’, écoute ‘listen’) and temporal and consecutive markers (pis ‘and, so, so what?’, alors ‘so’, (ça) fait que ‘so’). From a lexico-semantic point of view, regional variation – a not insignificant characteristic of DMs – results from the fact that an item whose meaning predisposes it to become a pragmatic item becomes pragmaticalized in one region but not necessarily in the other, or does not attain the same degree of pragmaticalization in one region as in another.