Discourse Markers as the Classificatory Factors of Speech Acts

Abstract

Since the debut of the speech act theory, the classification standards of speech acts have been in dispute. Traditional abstract taxonomies seem insufficient to meet the needs of artificial intelligence for identifying and even understanding speech acts. To facilitate the automatic identification of the communicative intentions in human dialogs, scholars have tried some data-driven methods based on speech-act annotated corpora. However, few studies have objectively evaluated those classification schemes. In this regard, the current study applied the frequencies of the eleven discourse markers (oh, well, and, but, or, so, because, now, then, I mean, and you know) proposed by Schiffrin [24] to investigate whether they can be effective indicators of speech act variations. The results showed that the five speech acts of Agreement can be well classified in terms of their functions by the frequencies of discourse markers. Moreover, it was found that the discourse markers well and oh are rather efficacious in differentiating distinct speech acts. This paper indicates that quantitative indexes can reflect the characteristics of human speech acts, and more objective and data-based classification schemes might be achieved based on these metrics.