Chapter 5

Discourse markers and discourse relations

We investigate if and how Discourse Markers (DMs) can be integrated into a dynamic semantic framework (in the SDRT variant, cf. Asher & Lascarides 2003, 2008, 2009) in order to study the relationships between discursive markers and rhetoric relations in a dialogue. We assume that short answers (Schlangen & Lascarides 2003) and DMs have the same basic characteristics: (i) both are semantically under-specified; (ii) in both cases, the receiver adds, by deduction, significant elements, in order to narrow, or even eliminate the semantic under-specification. We illustrate the possibility of integrating the DMs in the SDRT by examining the behaviour of the French DM quoi ‘what’ in a corpus in expressing rhetorical relations, such as:

• Explanation(α, β) (A: – Le curé est arrivé à pied, ou quoi ? B: – Il est venu dans la voiture de Mathurin. ‘A : – The priest arrived on foot, or what? B: – He came in Mathurin’s car’)

• Contrast(α, β) (A: – Je vais attendre. B: - Attendre quoi? Ils viennent de sortir. ‘A : I am going to wait. B: – What for? They have just left’);

• Phatic(α, β), when the channel is not functioning (A: -Coco! B (who is hard of hearing): – Quoi ? A: (screaming) – Ils te disent au revoir. ‘A: – Coco! B : -What? A: – They are saying ‘good bye’ to you’).

The study of DMs within SDRT tells us a lot about the deductive processes implied by the good functioning the human communication.