Speech-to-speech translation technology has difficulties processing elements of spontaneity in conversation. We propose a discourse marker attribute in speech corpora to help overcome some of these problems. There have already been some attempts to annotate discourse markers in speech corpora. However, as there is no consistency on what expressions count as discourse markers, we have to reconsider how to set a framework for annotating, and, in order to better understand what we gain by introducing a discourse marker category, we have to analyse their characteristics and functions in discourse. This is especially important for languages such as Slovenian where no or little research on the topic of discourse markers has been carried out. The aims of this paper are to present a scheme for annotating discourse markers based on the analysis of a corpus of telephone conversations in the tourism domain in the Slovenian language, and to give some additional arguments based on the characteristics and functions of discourse markers that confirm their special status in conversation.
The relationships between text or talk and the context are among the basic fields of pragmatic research and an insight into their nature may contribute to a better understanding of language use. In this article, we use the results of an analysis of discourse marker use in two different conversational genres (telephone conversation and television interviews) in an attempt to examine the impact of context on the use of discourse markers, generalized for each analysed genre. In the first stage of the analysis, we observe important differences between the two genres: discourse markers are far more frequently used in telephone conversations than in television interviews. In the second stage of the analysis, we identify several contextual factors which contribute to the differences in the use of discourse markers. In this way, we obtain insight into this particular aspect of genre context-talk relationships, and identify some of the characteristics of the genres in question.K E Y W O R D S : context-talk relationships, conversational genre, discourse markers, language use, pragmatic expression, sociocognitive context model
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