Variation in discourse marker use. Position matters!

Degand, Liesbeth [UCL]

Discourse markers have been described as typically occurring in utterance-initial position, also described as left-peripheral position. But more recently, discourse markers occurring at utterance-final, or right-peripheral position have attracted quite some researchers' attention too (for an overview, Degand forthc.). In this context, I would like to raise the question whether we find differentiated paradigms in these two key positions, or whether the semantic and pragmatic distribution of a given discourse marker remains stable whatever its position in the utterance. Beeching and Detges (forthc.) propose that the left periphery is the locus of subjective meanings, and that the right periphery favours intersubjective meanings. This hypothesis has been empirically tested for specific discourse markers, but was only partially confirmed (e.g. Degand forthc., Traugott 2012). In this presentation, I will focus on the peripheral distribution of all DMs extracted from the LOCAS-F corpus, a multi-genre corpus of spoken French segmented into “basic discourse units” and annotated with syntactic and prosodic functions (Degand et al. forthc.) in order to further explore the peripheral paradigm hypothesis.