Towards an operational category of discourse markers: A definition and its model

The field of discourse markers (DMs) studies suffers from lack of consensus on the limits and definition of the category. There seems to be a crucial need for paradigmatic studies that account for every kind of DM in bilingual data. This study presents a proposal for an operational, corpus-based definition of DMs that addresses several theoretical and methodological shortcomings in the field. I claim that any categorical definition is only useful insofar as it is endorsed by an empirical model of identification and annotation. I will describe and illustrate such a model by relevant authentic examples from a pilot study on a comparable corpus of French and English interviews.