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Part of
Empirical Studies of the Construction of Discourse
Edited by Óscar Loureda, Inés Recio Fernández, Laura Nadal and Adriana Cruz
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 305] 2019
► pp. 43–60

Chapter 2
Local vs. global scope of discourse markers

Corpus-based evidence from syntax and pauses

| University of Louvain

This paper discusses the relevance and challenges of a corpus-based investigation of the scope of discourse markers. It builds on Lenk’s (1998) distinction between local and global scope of discourse markers and maps it with annotation variables available in existing corpora. Given the interplay of syntactic and semantic-pragmatic variables that a direct approach to scope involves, it is argued that indirect and independent cues (namely position of the marker, its degree of syntactic integration and co-occurrence with pauses) offer a more reliable access to the variation in scope. The analysis focuses on three pairs of discourse markers (topic-shifting vs. topic-resuming, coordinating vs. subordinating conjunctions, objective vs. subjective uses of so) in a corpus of spoken English.

Keywords: discourse markers, scope, pauses, position, annotation, corpus-based
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Accessing DM scope through direct and indirect evidence
  • 3.DisFrEn: Corpus and annotation
  • 4.Syntax and pauses as indirect measures of DM scope
    • 4.1Function-specific: Topic-shifting vs. topic-resuming
    • 4.2POS-specific: Subordination vs. coordination
    • 4.3DM-specific: So expressing consequence vs. conclusion
  • 5.Summary and discussion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 6 August 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.305.02cri
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