3rd SFB Colloquium

In the 3rd colloquium of the SFB 1287 colloquium series, Prof. Liesbeth Degand will present her research on Discourse Markers.

Discourse markers (henceforth DMs) are the focus of a very rich field of study, investigating their many forms and functions in various languages. However, they are still rarely studied onomasiologically, especially in spoken multilingual data, as opposed to the bulk of contrastive case studies.

This presentation aims to analyze the variation in use and functions of a broad bottom-up selection of DMs across three languages from different typological families, namely French (Romance), English (Germanic) and Polish (Slavic).

Such an endeavor requires not only to overcome issues of definition and delimitation of the DM category, accounting for the diversity of their forms in different languages through an operational tertium comparationis (Krzeszowski 1981), but also to design an annotation model encompassing their full functional spectrum, in the perspective of spoken discourse analysis.