Linguistisches Forschungskaleidoskop: Vortrag von Liesbeth Degand (UCLouvain, Belgien)

Annotation of Discourse Markers in Spoken Language: A contrastive approach

Discourse markers (henceforth DMs) are the focus of a very rich field of study, investigating their many forms and functions in various languages. However, they are still rarely studied onomasiologically, especially in spoken multilingual data, as opposed to the bulk of contrastive case studies. This presentation aims to analyze the variation in use and functions of a broad bottom-up selection of DMs across three languages from different typological families, namely French (Romance), English (Germanic) and Polish (Slavic) (Degand, Broisson, Crible, Grzech, subm.). Such an endeavor requires not only to overcome issues of definition and delimitation of the DM category, accounting for the diversity of their forms in different languages through an operational tertium comparationis (Krzeszowski 1981), but also to design an annotation model encompassing their full functional spectrum, in the perspective of spoken discourse analysis.

Our study follows a corpus-based methodology based on Crible & Degand’s (2019) multilingual annotation scheme for functions of (spoken) DMs. The functional taxonomy distinguishes between four domains (ideational, rhetorical, sequential, interpersonal) that may be combined with fifteen functions (e.g. cause, contrast, topic-shift). This taxonomy with two independent levels has been applied to spoken unplanned dialogues in the three languages. The annotations were extracted for contrastive analyses of distribution and variation of DMs and their functions. The results indicate that the multilingual annotation scheme may be validly applied to the three different languages, demonstrating that semantic equivalence of DMs attested in different languages does not necessarily lead to functional and distributional similarities between them (e.g. in the case of English you know, French tu vois and Polish wiesz). Further results from testing the annotation scheme on additional languages (Slovenian, Spanish, L2 English) will also be presented.

Crible, L. and L. Degand. 2019. "Reliability vs. granularity in discourse annotation: What is the trade-off?." Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 15.1: 71-99.

Degand, L., Broisson, Z., Crible, L., and Grzech, K. (subm.). Cross-linguistic variation in spoken discourse markers: Distribution, functions and domains. In: Elisabeth Peterson, Turo Hiltunen, Joseph Kern (Eds). Cross-linguistic variation in spoken discourse markers: Distribution, functions and domains. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Krzeszowski, T.P. 1981. Tertium Comparationis. In J. Fisiak (ed.), Linguistics: Prospects and Problems, Berlin, Mouton de Gruyter: 301-312.

Der Vortrag findet digital auf Zoom statt und ist Teil des des linguistischen Forschungskaleidoskops am Institut für Germanistik im Wintersemester 2020/21. Eine Übersicht über die weiteren Vorträge und die Zoom-Zugangsdaten finden Sie unter folgendem Link:

https://www.slm.uni-hamburg.de/germanistik/ueber-das-institut/aktuelles/2020/2020-10-12-forschungskaleidoskop-wise20-21/plakat-forschungskaleidoskop-20-21-a.pdf

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