Discourse Markers and (Dis)fluency: Forms and functions across languages and registers

268 Pages·2018·3.4 MB·English

by  Ludivine Crible

Discourse Markers and (Dis)fluency
Pragmatics & Beyond New Series (P&bns)
issn 0922-842X
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Editor Associate Editor
Anita Fetzer Andreas H. Jucker
University of Augsburg University of Zurich
Founding Editors
Jacob L. Mey Herman Parret Jef Verschueren
University of Southern Belgian National Science Belgian National Science
Denmark Foundation, Universities of Foundation,
Louvain and Antwerp University of Antwerp
Editorial Board
Robyn Carston Sachiko Ide Paul Osamu Takahara
University College London Japan Women’s University Kobe City University of
Foreign Studies
Thorstein Fretheim Kuniyoshi Kataoka
University of Trondheim Aichi University Sandra A. Thompson
University of California at
John C. Heritage Miriam A. Locher
Santa Barbara
University of California at Los Universität Basel
Angeles Teun A. van Dijk
Sophia S.A. Marmaridou
Universitat Pompeu Fabra,
Susan C. Herring University of Athens
Barcelona
Indiana University
Srikant Sarangi
Chaoqun Xie
Masako K. Hiraga Aalborg University
Fujian Normal University
St. Paul’s (Rikkyo) University
Marina Sbisà
Yunxia Zhu
University of Trieste
The University of Queensland

Volume 286
Discourse Markers and (Dis)fluency
Forms and functions across languages and registers
by Ludivine Crible
Discourse Markers
and (Dis)fluency
Forms and functions across languages and registers
Ludivine Crible
Université catholique de Louvain
John Benjamins Publishing Company
Amsterdam / Philadelphia
TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
8
the American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence
of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.
doi 10.1075/pbns.286
Cataloging-in-Publication Data available from Library of Congress:
lccn 2017059002 (print) / 2018000403 (e-book)
isbn 978 90 272 0046 4 (Hb)
isbn 978 90 272 6430 5 (e-book)
© 2018 – John Benjamins B.V.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any
other means, without written permission from the publisher.
John Benjamins Publishing Company · https://benjamins.com
Table of contents
List of figures ix
List of tables xi
List of abbreviations and acronyms xiii
Acknowledgments xv
Chapter 1
Introduction 1
1.1 Fluency in time and space 1
1.2 Background and objectives 4
1.3 Preview of the book 5
Chapter 2
Definitions and corpus-based approaches to fluency and disfluency 9
2.1 Disfluency or repair? Levelt’s legacy 10
2.2 Holistic definitions of fluency 13
2.3 Componential approaches to fluency and disfluency 14
2.3.1 Qualitative components of perception 14
2.3.2 Quantitative components of production 16
2.3.3 Götz’s qualitative-quantitative approach 20
2.4 Synthesis: Definition adopted in this work 22
2.5 A usage-based account of (dis)fluency 23
2.5.1 Key notions in usage-based linguistics 24
2.5.2 From schemas to sequences of fluencemes 24
2.5.3 Variation in context(s) 26
2.5.4 Accessing fluency through frequency 28
2.6 Summary and hypotheses 30
Chapter 3
Definitions and corpus-based approaches to discourse markers 33
3.1 From connectives to pragmatic markers: Defining the continuum 34
3.2 Discourse markers in contrastive linguistics 37
3.3 Models of discourse marker functions 40
3.3.1 Discourse relations in the Penn Discourse TreeBank 2.0 40
3.3.2 The many scopes of DM functions 43
vi Discourse Markers and (Dis)fluency
3.4 “Fluent” vs. “disfluent” discourse markers 47
3.4.1 DM features and (dis)fluency 47
3.4.2 Previous corpus-based accounts of DMs and disfluency 48
3.5 Summary and hypotheses 52
Chapter 4
Corpus and method 55
4.1 The DisFrEn dataset 55
4.1.1 Source corpora 55
4.1.2 Comparable corpus design 57
4.1.3 Corpus structure in situational features 59
4.2 Discourse marker annotation 61
4.2.1 Identification of DM tokens 62
4.2.2 Functional taxonomy 64
4.2.3 Three-fold positioning system 66
4.2.4 Other variables 69
4.2.5 Annotation procedure 70
4.3 Disfluency annotation 71
4.3.1 Simple fluencemes 72
4.3.2 Compound fluencemes 73
4.3.3 Related phenomena and diacritics 75
4.3.4 Annotation procedure 76
4.3.5 Macro-labels of sequences 78
4.4 Summary 79
Chapter 5
Portraying the category of discourse markers 81
5.1 Distribution across languages and registers 81
5.1.1 General frequency 82
5.1.2 The status of tag questions 83
5.1.3 Register variation 83
5.1.4 A greater effect of register over language? 85
5.1.5 DM expressions in contrast 85
5.1.6 Diversity hypothesis 87
5.2 Position of DMs: Initiality in question 89
5.2.1 Clause-initial DMs 89
5.2.2 Utterance-initial DMs 90
5.2.3 Turn-initial DMs 91
5.2.4 Non-initial DMs 93
5.2.5 Interim summary on position 97
Table of contents vii
5.3 Domains and functions: Frequency and diversity 98
5.3.1 Single domains 98
5.3.2 Single functions 107
5.3.3 Double domains and functions 111
5.4 Integrating syntax and pragmatics 113
5.5 Co-occurrence of DMs 119
5.5.1 Co-occurrence across languages and registers 120
5.5.2 Co-occurrence across positions 122
5.5.3 Integrated statistical model of co-occurrence 124
5.6 Summary 125
5.7 Interim discussion: The potential of bottom-up research 126
Chapter 6
Disfluency in interviews 129
6.1 Data 129
6.2 Fluenceme rates in English and French 130
6.2.1 Number of tags 130
6.2.2 Number of tokens 131
6.2.3 Radio vs. face-to-face interviews 133
6.3 Clustering tendencies 136
6.3.1 Isolation vs. combination 136
6.3.2 Most frequent clusters 137
6.3.3 DMs in clusters 138
6.4 Fluency as frequency 139
6.4.1 Frequency and structural complexity 139
6.4.2 Frequency and sequence length 142
6.5 Summary 146
Chapter 7
The (dis)fluency of discourse markers 149
7.1 Sequence types across registers 149
7.1.1 “Cluster” 150
7.1.2 “Sequence category” 152
7.1.3 “Internal structure” 156
7.1.4 Sequence-specific DMs 158
7.2 Sequence types across DM features 159
7.2.1 Disfluency and functional domain 159
7.2.2 Disfluency, domain and position 162
7.2.3 Synthesis of variables 165
7.3 Potentially Disfluent Functions 166
viii Discourse Markers and (Dis)fluency
7.3.1 PDFs across registers 167
7.3.2 PDFs and sequence types 169
7.3.3 PDFs and sequence structure 171
7.4 Summary 174
7.5 Interim discussion: The “silence” of corpora 175
Chapter 8
Discourse markers in repairs 177
8.1 Previous approaches to repair 178
8.1.1 Reformulation and its markers: The French classics 178
8.1.2 Contrastive perspectives on reformulation markers 180
8.1.3 From reformulation to repair: Levelt’s (1983) typology of repair 184
8.1.4 Research questions and hypotheses 186
8.2 Data and method 187
8.2.1 Selection criteria 188
8.2.2 Repair category 188
8.2.3 Relation to annotated fluencemes 190
8.2.4 Intra-annotator agreement 191
8.3 Repair categories across languages 191
8.4 DMs in repairs 193
8.4.1 Position of the DMs 193
8.4.2 DM lexemes 195
8.4.3 Potentially Disfluent Functions in repairs 196
8.4.4 Specification and enumeration 198
8.5 DMs and modified repetitions 200
8.6 Summary 201
8.7 Interim discussion: Low quantity, high quality? 203
Chapter 9
Conclusion 207
9.1 Summary of the main findings 207
9.2 General discussion 210
9.3 Implications and research avenues 212
Bibliography 215
Appendices
Appendix 1. Discourse markers by register 233
Appendix 2. List of discourse markers in DisFrEn and their functions 235
Appendix 3. List of functions in DisFrEn and their discourse markers 245
Appendix 4. Top-five most frequent functions by register in DisFrEn 249
Index 251
List of figures
Figure 2.1 Levelt’s (1983) terminology 11
Figure 4.1 Macro-syntactic segmentation for DM position 67
Figure 4.2 Partitur Editor annotation interface 70
Figure 5.1 Proportions of part-of-speech tags in news broadcasts 88
Figure 5.2 Proportions of part-of-speech tags in conversations 88
Figure 5.3 Macro-position (dependency level) of DMs 90
Figure 5.4 Proportions of turn-initial DMs by degree of interactivity 92
Figure 5.5 Proportions of POS-tags across macro-syntactic positions 93
Figure 5.6 Distribution of DM domains across registers 101
Figure 5.7 Proportions of interpersonal DMs in each register 103
Figure 5.8 Proportions of sequential DMs in each register 103
Figure 5.9 Balance of domains in the three degrees of preparation 104
Figure 5.10 Number of function types making up 50% of DMs
by register and language 109
Figure 5.11 Proportions of macro-syntactic slots in each domain 114
Figure 5.12 Extended association plot of domains and macro-position 116
Figure 5.13 Pruned classification tree of domains 118
Figure 6.1 Proportions of sequence type (coarse-grained)
by sequence length 143
Figure 6.2 Proportions of sequence type (fine-grained)
by sequence length 143
Figure 7.1 Conditional inference tree for isolated, clustered
and co-occurring DMs 151
Figure 7.2 Conditional inference tree for sequence category by register 153
Figure 7.3 Extended association plot of sequence categories by register 154
Figure 7.4 Extended association plot of functional domains
by sequence type 159
Figure 7.5 DM domains on the scale of (dis)fluency 161
Figure 7.6 Multiple correspondence analysis of domains, position
and sequence type 164
Figure 7.7 Extended association plot of PDFs and non-PDFs
across registers 168
x Discourse Markers and (Dis)fluency
Figure 7.8 Extended association plot of PDFs and non-PDFs
across sequence types 169
Figure 7.9 Length of sequences in fluenceme tokens in PDFs
and non-PDFs 172