Liesbeth Degand is a Professor of General and Dutch Linguistics at the University of Louvain and at present the Head of the School of Languages, Linguistics and Literature.

Her main research interests are discourse studies, contrastive linguistics (mainly Dutch-French), the semantics of discourse markers, grammaticalization and intersubjectification, discourse processing, and the discourse-grammar interface.

Her numerous publications include the edited books Fluency and Disfluency across Languages and Language Varieties (Degand, Gilquin, Meurant & Simon 2019) and Discourse Markers and Modal Particles (Degand, Cornillie & Pietrandrea 2013).

In the period of 2014-2018, she was the Chair of the TextLink: Cost Action research project, with 150 research members from across 26 member countries, whose main aim was to unify linguistic resources on discourse structure. At the moment, she is involved in the COBRA ITN network on prediction and alignment in spoken interaction.

ABSTRACT

SPOKEN DISCOURSE SEGMENTATION: 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 interaction between 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. In particular, I will develop how they interact (or not) with the function and meaning of Discourse Markers (Degand & Crible, forthc.) and open up some perspectives with respect to their role in turn management.

References

Degand, L. & Crible, L. (forthc.). Discourse markers at the peripheries of syntax, intonation and turns. Towards a cognitive-functional unit of segmentation. In. Daniël Van Olmen & Jolanta Šinkūnienė (Eds). Pragmatic Markers and Peripheries. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Degand, L. & Simon, A.C. (2009a). On identifying basic discourse units in speech: theoretical and empirical issues. Discours 4 (online-journal). [available online at URL: http://discours.revues.org/index54.html]

Degand, L. & Simon, Anne Catherine (2009b). Mapping prosody and syntax as a strategic choice. Dagmar Barth-Weingarten, Nicole Dehé, and Anne Wichmann (eds). Where Prosody Meets Pragmatics. Bangalore: Emerald. [Studies in Pragmatics, Volume 8], 79-105.

Degand, Liesbeth, Laurence J. Martin, and Anne-Catherine Simon. 2014. “Unités discursives de base et leur périphérie gauche dans LOCAS-F, un corpus oral multigenres annoté.” In CMLF 2014 - 4ème Congrès Mondial de Linguistique Française 2014, edited by EDP Sciences. Berlin, Allemagne.

Martin, Laurence J., Degand, Liesbeth & Simon, Anne Catherine. (2014). Forme et fonction de la périphérie gauche dans un corpus oral multigenres annoté. Corpus 13. 243-265. [available on-line : http://corpus.revues.org/2154]

Simon, Anne Catherine & Degand, Liesbeth (2011). L’analyse en unités discursives de base : pourquoi et comment ? Langue française 170, 45-59.