Spoken language is characterized by the occurrence of linguistic devices such as discourse markers (e.g. so, well, you know, I mean) and other so-called “disfluent” phenomena, which reflect the temporal nature of the cognitive mechanisms underlying speech production and comprehension. The purpose of this book is to distinguish between strategic vs. symptomatic uses of these markers on the basis of their combination, function and distribution across several registers in English and French. Through deep quantitative and qualitative analyses of manually annotated features in the new DisFrEn corpus, this usage-based study provides (i) an exhaustive portrait of discourse markers in English and French and (ii) a scale of (dis)fluency against which different configurations of discourse markers can be diagnosed as rather fluent or disfluent. By bringing together discourse markers and (dis)fluency under one coherent framework, this book is a unique contribution to corpus-based pragmatics, discourse analysis and crosslinguistic fluency research.

The Handbook of Speech Production is the first reference work to provide an overview of this burgeoning area of study. Twenty-four chapters written by an international team of authors examine issues in speech planning, motor control, the physical aspects of speech production, and external factors that impact speech production. Contributions bring together behavioral, clinical, computational, developmental, and neuropsychological perspectives on speech production to create a rich and truly interdisciplinary resource Offers a novel and timely contribution to the literature and showcases a broad spectrum of research in speech production, methodological advances, and modeling Coverage of planning, motor control, articulatory coordination, the speech mechanism, and the effect of language on production processes

This book is a comparative corpus-based study of discourse markers based on verbs of saying in English and French. Based on a wide comparable web corpus, the book investigates how discourse markers work in discourse, and compares their differences of position, scope and collocations both cross-linguistically and within single languages. The author positions this study within the wider epistemological background of the French-speaking ‘enunciative’ tradition and the English-speaking ‘pragmatic’ tradition, and it will be of particular interest to students and scholars of semantics, pragmatics and contrastive linguistics.

This book provides an in-depth look at pragmatic development by second language learners of French through their production of French discourse markers. It showcases a holistic production-focused approach designed to provide a broad picture of learner discourse marker use in French. The book begins with a comprehensive description of the major theoretical frameworks in discourse marker research. It provides a detailed analysis of prior second language research on discourse markers in several languages and the dominant avenues of inquiry. Additionally, this book engages in a discussion of methodology that can serve as a guide for future researchers on the topic. The data presented in this book provide a broad picture of both native speaker and learner production of discourse markers with implications for theoretical and formal understandings of pragmatic meaning. This book will be of particular interest to scholars in pragmatics for both second language acquisition and formal or theoretical perspectives.

Language is a complex system that transfers ideas, feelings, experiences, beliefs, and cultures to others. One of the interactional resources that are utilised to make this transmission more coherent and effective is Discourse Markers (DMs). This monograph analyses these markers in doctoral supervisions but uses a multimodal approach to provide a deeper understanding of these DMs and uncovers potential hidden meanings that would escape a purely verbal analysis. Using a dataset consisting of a corpus of video-recorded doctoral supervision meetings, this book provides an innovative and cutting-edge approach to the analysis of DMs and sheds new light on the complexity and dynamicity of naturally occurring discourse where meaning-making rests on a close coordination of both verbal and embodied conducts. The book makes very useful reading for scholars in the fields of discourse markers, conversation analysis, corpus linguistics and multimodality. It could collaterally be appealing to anyone simply interested in the study of human communication.

Fluency and disfluency are characteristic of online language production and may be signalled by markers such as filled and unfilled pauses, discourse markers, repeats or self-repairs, which can be said to reflect ongoing mechanisms of processing and monitoring. The Fluency & Disfluency across Languages and Language Varieties conference held at the University of Louvain in February 2017 marked the closing of a five-year research project dedicated to the multimodal and contrastive investigation of fluency and disfluency in (L1 and L2) English, French and French Belgian sign language, with a focus on variation according to language, speaker and genre. The closing conference was intended as an opportunity to further expand the range of languages, language varieties and genres studied from the (dis)fluency perspective. The selection of papers in this volume re ects the diversity of approaches aiming to uncover the ways in which fluency and disfluency are conceived in language production and comprehension and how they are signalled. Topics include methodological challenges in cross-linguistic (dis)fluency research, the role of contextual features in professional and non-professional settings, and the characteristics of fluency and disfluency in second language speech. Of particular importance in all contributions is the ambivalent role of pauses, discourse markers, repeats and other markers, which can be both a symptom of encoding difficulties and a sign that the speaker is trying to help the hearer decode the message. They should thus be interpreted in context to identify their contribution to fluency and/or disfluency, which can be viewed as two sides of the same coin.

The aim of this volume is to bring together researchers interested in investigating the role that Discourse Markers play in language production and comprehension from an experimental or corpus-based perspective. In any kind of human communication, Discourse Markers are part of the game. This omnipresence informs us of a crucial inherent aspect of human language. Yet, as a linguistic category, Discourse Markers remain underdetermined. To gain deeper insight into this complex linguistic category, more systematic work is needed on the production and on the interpretation of Discourse Markers in a variety of situational settings, resorting to different methodological approaches. The contributions in this volume aim at drawing more attention to the double face of Discourse Markers, namely as signals intentionally used by the speaker to facilitate the addressee’s interpretation of the discourse, but also as potential traces of the speaker’s production difficulties. The combination of experimental and corpus-based approaches and the focus on processing of Discourse Markers in both production and comprehension makes this volume a unique contribution in answering the question why we use Discourse Markers in certain situations, but also when we do not.