Cue words and the topic structure of spoken discourse: The case of Swedish men ‘but’

Discourse Particles in French: Prosodic Parameters Extraction and Analysis

“…DP frequently exhibit phonetic attrition. They have prosodic autonomy and can be singled out by a pause or a specific prosodic pattern (see [20,21,14,1]). In French, they tend to be mono-or bisyllabic, but some of them are also 'complex', i.e., combinations like 'bon ben quoi voilà hein', 'mais enfin' or 'écoutez donc'.…”

A Methodology for the Identification of Topic Transitions in Interaction

“…It has been suggested that transitions can be identifi ed thanks to a number of linguistic markers. A wide array of markers of topic structure have been proposed in the literature: a concord of agreements and/or pauses (Maynard, 1980), existential structures (Berthoud, 1996;Geluykens, 1993), phatics and interjections (Berthoud & Mondada, 1995), dislocations (Grobet, 2002), cle s (Grobet, 2002), discourse markers (Horne et al, 2001) such as so (Bolden, 2006), new referents (Keenan Ochs & Schieff elin, 1976), etc. As far as prosodic cues are concerned, pitch parameters such as higher onsets (Nakajima & Allen, 1993), more range variation (Zellers, 2013) and fundamental equency peaks (Swerts & Geluykens, 1994) have been identifi ed for new topics.…”

How prosody reflects semantic change: A synchronic case study of of course

“…More recently there have been studies of the prosody of individual discourse markers (in English: you know (Holmes 1986), well (Bolinger 1989), now (Hirschberg and Litman 1993), anyway (Ferrara 1997, see also Wennerstrom 2001; in Swedish: men (Horne et al 2001) The results have identified more nuances than in earlier studies, but there is still no clearer view of the extent to which discourse markers exhibit unique sets of prosodic patterns. We are left with an incomplete picture of what to expect prosodically of discourse markers, making it difficult in turn to use prosodic features to identify function in cases of ambiguity.…”