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Article published In:
Languages in Contrast
Vol. 17:1 (2017) ► pp.69–95

The clustering of discourse markers and filled pauses

A corpus-based French-English study of (dis)fluency

| Université catholique de Louvain
This article presents a corpus-based contrastive study of (dis)fluency in French and English, focusing on the clustering of discourse markers (DMs) and filled pauses (FPs) across various spoken registers. Starting from the hypothesis that markers of (dis)fluency, or ‘fluencemes’, occur more frequently in sequences than in isolation, and that their contribution to the relative fluency of discourse can only be assessed by taking into account the contextual distribution of these sequences, this study uncovers the specific contextual conditions that trigger the clustering of fluencemes in the two languages. First, the contexts of appearance of DMs and FPs are described separately, both in English and French, focusing on their distribution, position and co-occurrence patterns. Then, the combination of DMs and FPs in sequences and their different configurations (DM+FP, FP+DM, etc.) are investigated. Overall, it appears that FPs function differently depending on whether they are clustered with DMs or not, and this difference consists in either maintaining or erasing inter- and intra-linguistic contrasts.
Keywords: fluency, filled pauses, discourse markers, comparable corpus, English/French
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.An integrated approach to native (dis)fluency
    • 2.1A multifaceted phenomenon
    • 2.2Contrastive fluency: discourse markers and filled pauses
    • 2.3Where are we (dis)fluent?
  • 3. DisFrEn: an enriched comparable dataset
    • 3.1Data
    • 3.2Annotation of fluencemes
  • 4.Crosslinguistic profiles of individual fluencemes
    • 4.1Isolated DMs
      • 4.1.1Frequency
      • 4.1.2Position of DMs
      • 4.1.3Co-occurrence with other DMs and unfilled pauses
    • 4.2Isolated FPs
      • 4.2.1Frequency
      • 4.2.2Sample analysis: position and co-occurrence
      • 4.2.3Euh, uh and uhm in isolated contexts
  • 5.The impact of clustering on the distribution of DMs and FPs
    • 5.1Distribution of the clusters
      • 5.1.1Frequency
      • 5.1.2Position of the clusters
      • 5.1.3Co-occurrence with unfilled pauses
    • 5.2Clustering configurations
    • 5.3 Euh, uh and uhm in clusters
    • 5.4Can we predict the clustering of DMs and FPs?
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References


This article is currently available as a sample article.

Published online: 13 February 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lic.17.1.04cri
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