Abstract
In French, quite a number of words and expressions are frequently used as discourse particles in spoken language, especially in spontaneous speech. The semantic load of these words or expressions differ whether they are used as discourse particles or not. Therefore, the correct identification of their discourse function remains of great importance. In this paper the distribution of the discourse function (or not discourse function), and of the detailed discourse functions of some of these words, is studied on a large set of French corpora ranging from prepared speech (e.g. storytelling and broadcast news) to spontaneous speech (e.g. interviews and interactions between people). The paper is focused on a subset of discourse particles that are recurrent in the considered corpora. The discourse function of a few thousand occurrences of these words have been manually annotated. A statistical analysis of the functions of the words is presented and discussed with respect to the types of spoken corpora. Finally, some statistics with respect to a few prosodic correlates of the discourse particles are presented, as well as some results of automatic classification and detection of the word function (discourse particle or not) using prosodic features.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Aijmer, K.: Understanding Pragmatic Markers. A Variational Pragmatic Approach. Edinburgh UP, Edinburgh (2006)
Bartkova, K., Bastien, A., Dargnat, M.: How to be a discourse particle? In: Speech Prosody 2016, Boston, USA, pp. 859–863 (2016)
Degand, L., Fagard, B.: Alors between discourse and grammar: the role of syntactic position. Funct. Lang. 18, 19–56 (2011)
Hansen, M.B.M.: Particles at the Semantics-Pragmatics Interface: Synchronic and Diachronic Issues. Elsevier, Amsterdam (2008)
Wichmann, A., Simon-Vandenbergen, A.-A., Aijmer, K.: How prosody reflects semantic change: a synchronic case study of of course. In: Davidse, K., Vandelanotte, L., Cuyckens, H. (eds.) Subjectification, Intersubjectification and Grammaticalization, pp. 103–154. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin (2010)
Brinton, L.J.: Pragmatic Markers in English. Grammaticalization and Discourse Functions. De Gruyter, Berlin (1996)
Degand, L., Cornillie, B., Pietrandrea, P. (eds.): Discourse Markers and Modal Particles: Categorization and Description. John Benjamins, Amsterdam (2013)
Dostie, G.: Pragmaticalisation et marqueurs discursifs. De Boeck/Duculot, Liège (2004)
Hansen, M.B.M.: The Function of Discourse Particles. Benjamins, Amsterdam (1998)
Ducrot, O.: Le Dire et le dit. Editions de Minuit, Paris (1984)
Kleiber, G.: Sémiotique de l’interjection. Langue française 161, 10–23 (2006)
Sperber, D., Wilson, D.: Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Blackwell, Oxford (1986)
Blakemore, D.: Semantic Constraints on Relevance. Blackwell, Oxford (1987)
Denturck, E.: Ètude des marqueurs discursifs - L’exemple de “quoi”. Master Diss., Gent University (2008)
Fernandez-Vest, J.: Les particules énonciatives dans la construction du discours. Presses Universitaires de France, Paris (1994)
Galliano, S., Gravier, G., Chaubard, L.: The ESTER 2 evaluation campaign for rich transcription of French broadcasts. In: INTERSPEECH 2009, 10th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, Brighton, UK, pp. 2583–2586 (2009)
ORFEO project: http://www.projet-orfeo.fr/
French oral narrative: http://frenchoralnarrative.qub.ac.uk
CFPP2000: http://cfpp2000.univ-paris3.fr/
Branca-Rosoff, S., Fleury, S., Lefeuvre, F., Pires, M.: Discours sur la ville. Présentation du Corpus de Français Parlé Parisien des années 2000 (CFPP 2000)
C-ORAL-ROM: http://lablita.dit.unifi.it/corpora/descriptions/coralrom/
Cresti, E., do Nascimento, F. B., Moreno-Sandoval, A., Veronis, J., Martin, P., Choukri, K.: The C-ORAL-ROM CORPUS. A multilingual resource of spontaneous speech for romance languages. In: LREC 2004, 4th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, Lisbon, Portugal (2004)
Delic team: Autour du Corpus de référence du français parlé. Recherches sur le français parlé, no. 18, Publications de l’université de Provence, 265 p. (2004)
TUFS: http://www.tufs.ac.jp/ts/personal/ykawa/art/2014_Waseda_Corpus_TUFS.pdf
Valibel: http://www.uclouvain.be/81834.html
FLEURON: https://apps.atilf.fr/fleuron2/
OFROM: http://www.unine.ch/ofrom
Avanzi, M., Béguelin, M.-J., Diémoz, F.: Présentation du corpus OFROM - corpus oral de français de Suisse romande. Université de Neuchâtel, Switzerland (2012–2015)
Bechet, F., Maza, B., Bigouroux, N., Bazillon, T., El-Beze, M., De Mori, R., Arbillot, E.: DECODA: a call-centre human-human spoken conversation corpus. In: LREC 2012, 8th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, Istanbul, Turkey (2012)
Stede, M., Schmitz, B.: Discourse particles and discourse functions. Mach. Transl. 15(1–2), 125–147 (2000)
Dargnat, M., Bartkova, K., Jouvet, D.: Discourse particles in French: prosodic parameters extraction and analysis. In: SLSP 2015, International Conference on Statistical Language and Speech Processing, Budapest, Hungary (2015)
Bartkova, K., Jouvet, D.: Automatic detection of the prosodic structures of speech utterances. In: Železný, M., Habernal, I., Ronzhin, A. (eds.) SPECOM 2013. LNCS, vol. 8113, pp. 1–8. Springer, Cham (2013). doi:10.1007/978-3-319-01931-4_1
Martin, P.: Prosodic and rhythmic structures in French. Linguistics 25, 925–949 (1987)
Keras: https://keras.io/
Talkin, D.: A robust algorithm for pitch tracking (RAPT). In: Kleijn, W.B., Paliwal, K.K. (eds.) Speech Coding and Synthesis, pp. 495–518. Elsevier, Amsterdam (1995)
Acknowledgments
This work has been carried out in the framework of the ProsodCorpus operation supported by the CPER LCHN (Contrat Plan Etat Région “Langues, Connaissances et Humanités Numériques”). Some experiments presented in this paper have been carried out using the Grid’5000 testbed, supported by a scientific interest group hosted by Inria and including CNRS, RENATER and several Universities as well as other organizations (see https://www.grid5000.fr).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Springer International Publishing AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Jouvet, D., Bartkova, K., Dargnat, M., Lee, L. (2017). Analysis and Automatic Classification of Some Discourse Particles on a Large Set of French Spoken Corpora. In: Camelin, N., Estève, Y., Martín-Vide, C. (eds) Statistical Language and Speech Processing. SLSP 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10583. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68456-7_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68456-7_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-68455-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-68456-7
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)