Weak and Strong Discourse Markers in Speech, Chat, and Writing: Do Signals Compensate for Ambiguity in Explicit Relations?

ABSTRACT

Ambiguity in discourse is pervasive, yet mechanisms of production and processing suggest that it tends to be compensated in context. The present study sets out to analyze the combination of discourse markers (such as but or moreover) with other discourse signals (such as semantic relations or punctuation marks) across three genres (discussion, chat, and essay). The presence of discourse signals is expected to vary with the ambiguity of the discourse marker and with the genre. This analysis complements recent approaches to discourse signalling by zooming in on the different types of discourse markers with which other signals combine. The corpus annotation study uncovered three categories of marker strength—weak, intermediate, and strong—thus refining the concept of “explicitness.” Statistical modeling reveals that weak discourse markers are more often compensated than intermediate and strong markers, and that this compensation is not affected by genre variation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The term “discourse marker” will be used throughout this article in order to be consistent with previous publications and with the bulk of the literature, even though it mostly refers to what other authors call “connectives.” Operational definitions are provided in the methodology.

2. I would like to thank Prof. Liesbeth Degand and Fang Yang for their precious help with the double coding of the data.

3. The annotations on the 1,968 DM sample, as well as the R script used to conduct the analysis, are available as supplementary materials and on https://osf.io/6abyn/.

4. This is excluding a small number of very rare DMs (20 tokens or fewer) that showed one or two tokens in more than one function. The full table of DM types and their assigned functions can be found at https://osf.io/6abyn/.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the H2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action, IF 794575.