Crible, Ludivine; Demberg, Vera

The effect of genre variation on the production and acceptability of underspecified discourse markers in English

20th DiscourseNet, Budapest, Hungary, 2018.

It is generally assumed that coherence relies on building discourse relations across utterances (Mann & Thompson 1988). When producing discourse relations, speakers and writers have a choice between implicit and explicit marking (e.g. Taboada 2009, Yung et al. 2017), the latter being usually carried out by “connectives” or “discourse markers” (Schiffrin 1987). This paper focuses on a third, intermediate level between implicitness and explicitness, viz. underspecified discourse markers. They typically include and, but or so, which can be used to express many differents meanings besides their encoded one (addition, contrast and consequence, respectively). Our goal is to determine the contextual and linguistic conditions that favor the production of underspecified discourse markers. Specifically, we want to test whether underspecification is more frequent in informal and unplanned discourse genres. We report on the findings of two studies. First, the distribution of and, but and so and their different meanings is computed across different registers of spoken English from the DisFrEn corpus (Crible 2017). We then discuss the results of an offline experiment (forced choice task) targeting the acceptability of utterances containing and in two computer-mediated genres (blogs and chats). The combination of corpus-based and experimental methods is expected to highlight the role of frequency, cognition and genre expectations on discourse marker variation.

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