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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2023

Discourse Markers as information units formally conveyed by prosody

Résumé

We propose here (i) a clear definition of Discourse Markers (DMs) that allows their identification and description basically through prosodic features; (ii) the identification, also mainly through prosodic features, of different DMs, each one with a specific function. This proposal is based on the analysis of data from spontaneous speech corpora of several languages (mainly Brazilian Portuguese and Italian, but also Spanish and English) and is framed within the Language into Act Theory (Cresti, 2000; Raso & Moneglia, 2014). We propose that a DM be defined as a prosodic/information unit with interactional value (its function is to regulate the interaction and not to build the compositional text of the pattern), isolated in a prosodic unit; DMS, therefore, cannot be interpreted compositionally (semantically and syntactically) nor illocutionarily (they do not feature pragmatic and prosodic autonomy). This proposal presupposes the prosodic segmentation of the speech flow in Terminated Units (TU) and prosodic units. A TU is an information pattern or a juxtaposition of more information patterns linked by a prosodic signal of continuity. Each pattern features an illocutionary nucleus and the TU ends with a terminal prosodic break. The TU can be considered the reference unit of speech (Izre’el et al. 2020). The prosodic unit is tendentially isomorphic with informational functions, all conveyed by specific prosodic features. Prosody allows also to distinguish different DM functions. We propose six different DMs, each one with a specific function, the prosodic form that conveys the function and distributional constraints. On the contrary, the lexical fulfillment does not allow to identify a specific function, since the same lexical item or small sequence can be used with different prosodic and functional values. Although it is possible to find more or less evident lexical preference for each DM, what marks the function of a DM is always its prosodic profile. We will show data from different languages and measurements from a 30.000 word, fully informationally tagged minicorpus extracted from the C-ORAL-BRASIL corpus (Raso & Mello, 2012), a spontaneous speech corpus of Brazilian Portuguese. These data will allow to appreciate the six different forms that convey the different functions, their distributional features (that frequently, but not always, privilege the periphery of the information pattern), the lexical variability within the same functional value and, on the contrary, the fact that the same lexical item can fill at least two, but frequently more than two functions. We will also present the result of a first experiment that confirms the perception of functionally different DMs exclusively on the basis of prosodic features and with examples extracted by the corpus. The pilot of the experiment has shown between 80 and 90% of recognition of the 4 functions that feature distributional compatibility. The proposal is the present stage of a research conducted through many years on different spontaneous speech corpora (Frosali, 2008; Raso, 2014; Raso & Vieira, 2016; Gobbo, 2019; Raso et al., in press).

Domaines

Linguistique
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Dates et versions

hal-04359874 , version 1 (21-12-2023)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : hal-04359874 , version 1

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Tommaso Raso, Albert Rilliard, Saulo Mendes Santos, João Antônio De Moraes. Discourse Markers as information units formally conveyed by prosody. Discourse Markers - Theories and Methods, Laure Lansari; Ludivine Crible, May 2023, Paris, France. ⟨hal-04359874⟩
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