Fine phonetic details for discourse marker disambiguation: a corpus-based investigation

Yaru Wu (1) , Mathilde Hutin (2, 3) , Ioana Vasilescu (3) , Lori Lamel (3) , Martine Adda-Decker (4) , Liesbeth Degand (5)

1 CRISCO - Centre de recherche inter-langues sur la signification en contexte
2 LISN - Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire des Sciences du Numérique
3 TLP - Traitement du Langage Parlé - LISN
4 LPP - LPP - Laboratoire de Phonétique et Phonologie - UMR 7018
5 UCL - Université Catholique de Louvain = Catholic University of Louvain

In this study we examine phonetic variation of discourse markers in French, using for this purpose the4-hour richly annotated LOCAS-F corpus. Both linguistic factors and stylistic variables are considered:speech style, part-of-speech category, mean phone duration and vowel formant distributions with respect tothe word status. The results show that the use of discourse markers increases with the degree of spontaneity of the speech. Coordinating conjunctions are thepart-of-speech which is most frequently used for discourse markers. Moreover, the mean phone durationtends to be shorter and the vowel space more centralized when words are employed as discourse markers,suggesting that discourse markers undergo hypoarticulation and, more generally, reduction.

Domaines: Linguistique

Yaru Wu, Mathilde Hutin, Ioana Vasilescu, Lori Lamel, Martine Adda-Decker, et al.. Fine phonetic details for discourse marker disambiguation: a corpus-based investigation. DiSS 2021,the 10th Workshop on Disfluency in Spontaneous Speech, Aug 2021, Saint-Denis, France. pp.23-28. ⟨hal-03706218⟩