Bert Cornillie

Paola Pietrandrea

Liesbeth Degand

Discourse markers and modal particles are fuzzy linguistic categories that are difficult to describe. The contributions in this volume go beyond this statement. They discuss the intersection between modal particles and discourse markers and examine whether or not it is possible to draw a line between these two types of linguistic expressions. On the basis of new synchronic and diachronic data, from speech and writing, from European and Asian languages or cross-linguistically, the authors answer the question whether discourse markers and modal particles are distinct categories, whether they form a cline, or whether modal particles are a subcategory of discourse markers. This common question shows up throughout all chapters, which makes the book to a coherent whole. By disentangling the complexity of categorizing multifunctional expressions, this book also sheds new light on the processes of meaning extension. The traditional discourse and modal functions are complemented by interactional and textual ones. A must read for functional linguists.

Categorization and Description

Discourse Markers and Modal Particles

Anne Lacheret-Dujour

Sylvain Kahane

This monograph describes the development of Rhapsodie, a 33,000-word syntactic and prosodic treebank of spoken French created with the aim of modeling the interface between prosody, syntax and discourse in spoken French. Theoretical foundations and methodological choices are presented and discussed, and compared with other contemporary approaches. Why is a data-driven instead of a corpus-based approach necessary when one wants to model and analyze discourse without neglecting the features typical of everyday speech, in order to capture not only what we say but also how we say it? How can one show that verbal exchange operates as a collaborative enterprise and how can the specific syntactic and prosodic markers of this collaboration be merged? The description proposed in this collective book is of interest for specialists of spoken French studies, and also for scholars who would like to extend Rhapsodie-like annotation schemes to other languages.

Paola Pietrandrea

Books

Your next favorite book is out there