Selection and functional description of DMs in French and English: towards crosslinguistic and operational categories for contrastive annotation.

Discourse marker research still faces many terminological and theoretical issues which restrain progress in the field, despite the multiplicity of theoretical frameworks and approaches taken by many valuable works over the last decades (e.g. Aijmer & Simon-Vandenbergen 2006, Brinton 1996, Degand, Cornillie & Pietrandrea (eds) 2013, Fischer (ed.) 2006, Fraser 1999, Schiffrin 1987, Traugott 2007, Waltereit & Detges 2007 to name but a few). This paper presents criteria for the selection and classification of discourse markers in relation with the other two categories at stake in the Workshop (viz. pragmatic markers and modal particles). This is done in the light of a cross-linguistic annotation of DMs in an English-French comparable corpus of various communicative situations. Browsing a speech transcript for paradigmatic annotation of all DMs relies on several methodological prerequisites related to the consistency of the selected items, the operational efficiency of the criteria, the flexibility of the functional description to adapt to any occurrence, the feasibility and the non-circularity of the manual annotation, among others. In this presentation, I insist on the first two difficulties mentioned, i.e. what is to be considered a DM and according to which criteria. Many problematic cases appear to concern borderline uses that cross the delimitations of other categories of PMs, especially agreement markers and MPs, insofar as such a category can be defined for English and French. I will illustrate this definition and other distinctions applied in my annotation scheme by means of examples from my comparable corpus collection DisFrEn, and demonstrate how well it accounts for the specificities and diversity of DM use in English and French

Towards a Model for Discourse Marker Annotation in spoken French: From potential to feature-based discourse markers

Starting from the common observation that there is no recognized closed class of discourse markers (DMs) and that a number of linguistic markers may or may not count as DMs according to the definitions at stake (Schourup 1999: 228), we aim to present an empirical method for the identification and annotation of DMs in spontaneous spoken French (MDMA project). Central to our proposal is that DMs may be described as clusters of features that, in specific patterns of combination, allow distinguishing DM use from other uses. We proceeded in three steps: (i) using a very broad definition of DMs – i.e. items that “provide instructions to the hearer on how to integrate their host utterance into a developing mental model of the discourse in such a way as to make that utterance appear optimally coherent” (Hansen 2006: 25) – three analysts identified all potential DMs in an 800 words transcript; (ii) all types found were then extracted from a balanced 10,000 words corpus; and (iii) analyzed according to more than 10 features (including syntactic, semantic, collocational, and prosodic features). The hypothesis underlying our annotation experiment is that the analysis of the distributional constraints imposed on specific markers should uncover reliable features for the identification and categorization of DMs. The potential DMs extracted at the first step of analysis refer to those linguistic expressions that can, in one context or another, fulfill a DM function, i.e. be used at either of the following “levels” or “domains”: “the sequential structure of the dialogue, the turn-taking system, speech management, interpersonal management, the topic structure, and participation frameworks” (Fischer 2006: 9). For example, tu vois ‘you see’ is defined as a potential DM because it can occur in contexts where it serves to manage the relationship between speaker and hearer (1), although in other contexts it does not (2). In line with the objectives of the workshop, our endeavor seeks to establish (more) reliable criteria for the categorization as DMs, and how to distinguish them from other linguistic items fulfilling a non-propositional function, such as modal particles (Degand et al. 2013) or pragmatic markers (Brinton 1996). Disagreement between annotators also reveals borderline cases where, although some discursive, pragmatic, indexical function is commonly detected, there seems to be some hesitation as to what category these items belong to (such as c'est ça ‘that’s it’, quand même ‘still’ in examples 3-4). In this presentation, we first briefly go over our methodological choices and issues, and then uncover problematic examples of inter-coder disagreement, as well as the first results of the statistical analysis of clusters of features. The latter suggests that there is a certain hierarchy between the different features under scrutiny, regarding their relevance, reliability, or usefulness in the process of identifying DMs in context