The Prosody of Discourse Makers alors and et in French: A Corpus-Based Study on Multiple Speaking Styles

Abstract

In this study, we investigate the prosodic characteristics of two French discourse markers (DMs), alors and et. Our study is based on a 8-h corpus covering 8 different speaking styles, with an average of 10 speakers per communicative situation. The tokens were classified depending on whether they are being used as discourse markers (DMs) or not; additionally in the case of et used as a conjunction, the type of the co-ordinated syntactic elements was identified. An automated prosodic analysis of all occurrences was performed. Results show that the use of et as a DM was more prevalent in non-planned speech; silent pauses preceded occurrences of alors and et, both as DMs and as non-DMs; the difference in silent pause duration, in the DM uses vs in the non-DM uses, was not statistically significant for alors and was statistically significant for et; DMs did not systematically constitute a separate prosodic unit; a strong prosodic boundary differentiates between the use of et as a DM or as a co-ordinating conjunction between verb phrases and subordinate clauses, and its other non-DM uses.