Lisbeth Degand - Spoken discourse segmentation and discourse strategies: The role of prosody, syntax and pragmatics

In this talk, I will give an overview of my work on spoken discourse segmentation and on discourse markers in order to explore how these two linguistic phenomena interact, and what they can tell us about the discourse-grammar interface in view of a better comprehension of human communication.

Discourse segmentation in units is a crucial process in order to understand discourse production and comprehension. We developed a method for segmenting spoken discourse in Basic Discourse Units (BDUs), based on the mapping of syntactic units (dependency clauses) and prosodic units (major intonation units). BDUs result from the coincidence of syntactic and prosodic boundaries, corresponding to distinct but complementary linguistic encodings. This mapping gives rise to different types of discourse units (congruent, syntax-bound, intonation-bound, regulatory) (Degand & Simon 2009a, Simon & Degand, 2011). Thus, our claim is that the prosody-syntax interface gives rise to a distinctive discursive level of analysis contributing to the unfolding (linear) discourse, e.g. in the form of different discursive strategies (Degand & Simon, 2009b; Martin, Degand, & Simon 2014). The BDU segmentation has been applied to a corpus of spoken French, LOCAS-F (Degand, Martin & Simon, 2014) comprising 14 different speech situations (political debate, interview, spontaneous conversation, conference, …). The data is now available to explore to what extent these BDUs have cognitive validity in production and/or comprehension.

The talk will give an overview of two research strands. On the one hand, I will show that discourse segmentation interacts with discourse genres, in particular with the underlying features related to the degree of preparation, interaction and formality. On the other hand, I will develop how BDUs interact (or not) with the function and meaning of Discourse Markers (Degand & Crible, 2021) and open up some perspectives with respect to their role in turn management.