In:Pragmatic Markers, Discourse Markers and Modal Particles: New perspectives
Edited by Chiara Fedriani and Andrea Sansó
[Studies in Language Companion Series 186] 2017
► pp. 151–167
Chapter 5Discourse markers and discourse relations
The French DM quoi
Published online: 13 November 2017
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.186.06cos
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.186.06cos
Abstract
We investigate if and how Discourse Markers (DMs) can be integrated into a dynamic semantic framework (in the SDRT variant, cf. Asher & Lascarides 2003, 2008, 2009) in order to study the relationships between discursive markers and rhetoric relations in a dialogue. We assume that short answers (Schlangen & Lascarides 2003) and DMs have the same basic characteristics: (i) both are semantically under-specified; (ii) in both cases, the receiver adds, by deduction, significant elements, in order to narrow, or even eliminate the semantic under-specification. We illustrate the possibility of integrating the DMs in the SDRT by examining the behaviour of the French DM quoi ‘what’ in a corpus in expressing rhetorical relations, such as:
–
Explanation(α, β) (A: – Le curé est arrivé à pied, ou quoi
? B: – Il est venu dans la voiture de Mathurin. ‘A : – The priest arrived on foot, or what? B: – He came in Mathurin’s car’)
–
Contrast(α, β) (A: – Je vais attendre. B: - Attendre quoi? Ils viennent de sortir. ‘A : I am going to wait. B: – What for? They have just left’);
–
Phatic(α, β), when the channel is not functioning (A: -Coco! B (who is hard of hearing): –
Quoi
? A: (screaming) – Ils te disent au revoir. ‘A: – Coco! B : -What? A: – They are saying ‘good bye’ to you’).
The study of DMs within SDRT tells us a lot about the deductive processes implied by the good functioning the human communication.
Keywords: discourse markers, rhetorical relations, dialogue, SDRT
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.SDRT and Discourse Markers
- 3.Fragments and DMs
- 4.An example: The DM quoi
- A.Beliefs
- B.Intentions
- C.Emotions
- 5.Conclusions
Notes References Corpus
References (21)
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My corpus also contains the occurrences of quoi in texts written by other 17 French authors of the 19th and 20th c., such as Camus, Sartre, Bazin, Giraudoux, Bernanos, etc. Another 450 examples were chosen from Trésor de la Langue Française informatisé, <http://atilf.atilf.fr/>, with the command ‘Recherche complexe.’