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

Abstract

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