L’oral au pied de la lettre : raison et déraison graphiques

Dans cet article, je discute les principaux procédés graphiques utilisés par Michel Tremblay pour rendre compte des particularités orales de langue de ses personnages, en me concentrant sur cinq pièces. Je m’intéresse plus précisément aux procédés graphiques qui permettent une « mise en texte » des caractéristiques communicationnelles de l’oralité et de ses variations. Ces éléments sont de trois ordres, en rapport avec le dispositif discursif particulier de la littérature et du genre dramatique. Je me concentre sur les éléments graphiques qui relèvent de l’échange personnage-personnage. Dans les textes choisis, ces éléments sont souvent associés à une « déraison graphique » (Christin en référence à Goody), c’est-à-dire à une certaine iconicité du langage, mais cette déraison est toute relative. Les « néographies phonétisantes » (Anis) en constituent un exemple majeur. Ces formes, qui sont détournées de l’orthographe pour rendre compte de phénomènes oraux comme le débit ou la variation phonétique, résultent plus d’une négociation avec les contraintes du code écrit, que de leur remise en cause radicale. La plupart des dramaturges qui usent de ce procédé n’inventent pas une nouvelle langue ni de nouveaux graphèmes, ils essaient de rendre compte de la variété linguistique des personnages qu’ils créent, ils bricolent des profils langagiers crédibles pour stigmatiser une classe sociale ou simplement différencier les personnages entre eux.In this paper, focusing on a set of five plays by Michel Tremblay, I discuss the major graphical techniques that he exploits in order to take into account the spoken language features of his characters’ linguistic usage. More precisely, I examine those techniques that allow one to “textualize” the specific aspects of oral speech and its variations. I investigate the graphical elements of communication between characters. In the texts at hand, these elements are often associated with some “déraison graphique” (“graphical deviance,” Christin echoing Goody) that is, to a form of iconicity in language, whose deviant character is in fact rather moderate. The phonetic transliterations are a case in point. Those forms depart from standard spelling to capture oral phenomena such as speed and phonetic variation and result more from an adaptation of the code constraints, than from a radical upturn. Most drama writers who use that technique do not create new languages nor new graphemes ; rather, they try to do justice to the linguistic diversity of their creations, making up plausible linguistic profiles in order to stigmatise a social class or just to distinguish between the characters

Discourse 'Major Continuatives' in a Non-Monotonic Framework

International audienceDelattre (1966) proposed a classification of French basic melodic contours. He defined in particular 'major continu atives' as melodic rises that mark the frontier between higher constituents in a hierarchy of clausal and sentential constituents. Although Delattre's empirical basis for his classification has been discussed, there is a strong intuition that some sort of melodic rise can be used in French at the frontier between discourse constituents. The go al of this paper is to explore this possibility in two directions. First, we provide experimental evidence that, taken in isolation, major continuatives are not sig nificantly discriminated from interrogative contours by 'naïve' subjects, having no training in phonetics. Second, we try to account for the fact that, in real discourse, people do not confuse major continuatives and interrogative contours, by controlling the interactions between interpretation constraints using a non - monotonic logic in the general framework of Answer Set Programmin

L'oral comme fiction : stylistique de l'oralité populaire dans le théâtre de Michel Tremblay (1968-1998)

Thèse numérisée par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal

L'oral comme fiction.

Specifically, I offer a comparison between the images of spoken language conveyed by a particular dramatic work (five plays by the Quebecois writer Michel Tremblay) and by a linguistic transcription (the Sankoff-Cedergren and Montreal 84 corpora). Two conclusions are drawn. First, systematically comparing the linguistic and literary corpora allows one to highlight the different constraints that shape the coding of orality, e.g. in the graphical, syntactic and discourse dimensions. Second, in the literary corpus, orality is more than a socio-linguistic parameter. It plays a rôle in the organization of narrative fiction. This shows that orality is doubly fictional, as a piece of social imagination about language and as a part of a given narrative and emotional universe.Methodologically, I used the Weblex software (http://weblex.ens-lsh.fr/wlx/), which allows one to compare the various transcriptions of words and idioms typically found in spoken language and to uncover the technical or aesthetical choices of transcribers or writers. Moreover, the software helps extracting the linguistic profiles of characters and the stylistic changes in the intertwining of language and narrative fiction over thirty years (1968-1998).Theoretically, the main question is what «filters» are used in representing spoken language. The present work argues that two requirements have to be met. (a) Linguistic categories have to be defined in a precise way, in order for researchers to build and exploit non-standard language corpora, be they transcriptions or literary works. (b) Linguistic description should be connected to a study of cultural and emotional factors, for a better understanding of the three components (linguistic, symbolic and aesthetic) that make up orality.Ce travail est consacré à une comparaison entre l'image de l'oral véhiculée par une œuvre théâtrale (cinq pièces de l'écrivain québécois Michel Tremblay) et par une transcription linguistique (corpus Sankoff-Cedergren et Montréal 84). Il aboutit à deux conclusions. D'une part, la comparaison systématique du corpus littéraire et linguistique met en évidence les contraintes différenciées qui pèsent sur le codage de l'oralité (aux niveaux graphique, syntaxique et énonciatif). D'autre part, l'oralité apparaît dans le corpus littéraire non seulement comme un paramètre sociolinguistique, mais aussi comme une composante de l'organisation fictionnelle narrative. L'oralité est ainsi doublement fictionnelle, à la fois imaginaire social de la langue et élément d'un univers narratif et affectif.Du point de vue méthodologique, l'étude repose sur l'utilisation du logiciel Weblex (http://weblex.ens-lsh.fr/wlx/), qui permet de comparer les différentes transcriptions de mots et de locutions caractéristiques de l'oral, et de mettre en évidence les choix techniques ou esthétiques des transcripteurs et de l'écrivain. Par ailleurs, à l'intérieur du corpus littéraire, on peut faire apparaître des profils linguistiques pour les différents personnages, ou encore dessiner une évolution stylistique du traitement de la fiction langagière sur trente ans (1968-1998).Du point de vue théorique, la question centrale est celle de la nature des « filtres » de l'oral. Ce travail montre une double nécessité : a. la nécessité d'une définition précise des catégories linguistiques pour constituer (annoter) et exploiter des corpus de langue non standard, qu'il s'agisse de transcriptions d'entretiens ou de littérature ; b. la nécessité d'articuler la description de la langue avec les aspects culturels et affectifs, pour mieux comprendre les trois dimensions (linguistique, symbolique et esthétique) du phénomène de l'oralité

Discourse Particles In French: Prosodic Parameters Extraction and Analysis

International audienceDetecting the correct syntactic function of a word is of great importance for language and speech processing. The semantic load of a word is different whether its function is a discourse particle or a preposition. Words having the function of a discourse particle (DP) are very frequent in spontaneous speech and their discursive function is often expressed only by prosodic means. Our study analyses some prosodic correlates of two French words (quoi,voiì a), used as discourse particles or pronoun (quoi) or preposition (voiì a). Our goal is to determine to what extent intrinsic and contextual prosodic properties characterize DP and non-DP functions. Prosodic parameters are analyzed with respect to the DP or non-DP function for these words extracted from large speech corpora. A preliminary test concerning the automatic detection of the word function is also carried out using prosodic parameters only, leading to an encouraging result of 70% correct identification

Aligning Discourse and Argumentation Structures using Subtrees and Redescription Mining

International audienceIn this paper, we investigate similarities between discourse and argumentation structures by aligning subtrees in a corpus containing both annotations. Contrary to previous works, we focus on comparing sub-structures and not only relation matches. Using data mining techniques , we show that discourse and argumen-tation most often align well, and the double annotation allows to derive a mapping between structures. Moreover, this approach enables the study of similarities between discourse structures and differences in their expressive power

Prosodic and Pragmatic Values of Discourse Particles in French

International audienceThis paper analyses prosodic properties of three discourse particles (DP) in French: 'alors' ('so'), 'bon' ('well') and 'donc' ('thus'), according to their different pragmatic functions. DP occurrences of these words extracted from a large speech database have been annotated manually with pragmatic labels. For each DP, prosodic characteristics of occurrences of each pragmatic function (conclusive, introductive, etc.) are automatically extracted. Then, for each DP and each pragmatic function, the most frequent F0 forms are retained as the representative forms. Results show that a pragmatic function, common to several discourse particles, gives rise to a uniform prosodic marking, and this lead to suppose that such DPs are most of the time commutable

AOC-Poset on discourse and argumentation subgraphs: what can we learn on their dependencies?

International audienceWe aim at finding and understanding dependencies between linguistic structures which differ in terms of constraints and expressive power. It has been shown that studying dependencies between the argu-mentation structure (ARG) and the Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) is non-trivial and requires a fine methodology. In this paper, we propose to take advantage of the AOC-Poset structure to understand how the subgraphs alignements occur in a small corpus annotated in ARG and RST. We formalize the structures as graphs from which we extract both subgraphs and subgraphs alignments, matching those subgraphs which include the same text segments. Based on these extractions, we build a formal context where the objects are the texts and the attributes are the subgraphs and the subgraphs alignments. We show what we can learn from the dependencies between the structures by mining the AOC-Poset made of these attributes

Analysis and Automatic Classification of Some Discourse Particles on a Large Set of French Spoken Corpora

International audienceIn French, quite a number of words and expressions are frequently used as discourse particles in spoken language, especially in spontaneous speech. The semantic load of these words or expressions differ whether they are used as discourse particles or not. Therefore, the correct identification of their discourse function remains of great importance. In this paper the distribution of the discourse function (or not discourse function), and of the detailed discourse functions of some of these words, is studied on a large set of French corpora ranging from prepared speech (e.g. storytelling and broadcast news) to spontaneous speech (e.g. interviews and interactions between people). The paper is focused on a subset of discourse particles that are recurrent in the considered corpora. The discourse function of a few thousand occurrences of these words have been manually annotated. A statistical analysis of the functions of the words is presented and discussed with respect to the types of spoken corpora. Finally, some statistics with respect to a few prosodic correlates of the discourse particles are presented, as well as some results of automatic classification and detection of the word function (discourse particle or not) using prosodic features

Alignement de Structures Argumentatives et Discursives par Fouille de Graphes et de Redescriptions

National audienceIn this paper, we investigate similarities between discourse and argumentation structures by aligning subtrees in a corpus containing both annotations. Contrary to previous works, we focus on comparing sub-structures and not only relation matches. Using data mining techniques , we show that discourse and argumen-tation most often align well, and the double annotation allows to derive a mapping between structures. Moreover, this approach enables the study of similarities between discourse structures and differences in their expressive power.Dans cet article, nous étudions la similarité entre structures argumen-tatives et discursives en alignant des sous-arbres dans un corpus annoté en RST et en structure argumentative. Contrairement aux travaux précédents, nous ne nous intéressons pas uniquement à un alignement relation à relation, mais à un alignement de sous-structures. À l'aide de méthodes de fouille de données, nous montrons que des similitudes existent entre l'argumentation et le discours. L'an-notation multiple du corpus permet également de proposer un alignement entre les structures. De plus, cette approche permet de mettre en évidence les diffé-rences d'expressivité des deux formalismes