Can prosody meet pragmatics? Case of discourse particles in French
Résumé
The goal of this study is to investigate how prosodic
parameters can contribute to retrieving the pragmatic
meaning of words with considerably diminished
semantic content. The paper focuses on six French
words used as discourse particles (DP): ‘alors’ (so),
‘bon’ (well), ‘donc’ (thus), ‘enfin’ (finally/anyway),
‘quoi’ (what), ‘voilà’ (there you go). Prosodic
properties of DPs are analysed with respect to their
pragmatic functions, using occurrences of
these words extracted from a large speech corpus, and
manually annotated with pragmatic labels. It was
found that occurrences with the same pragmatic value
have a great tendency to share the same prosodic
pattern; hence, the question of their commutability
arises. An auditory test has thus been conducted to
find out whether DPs of uniform pragmatic functions
are perceived as commutable and how prosodic
features help listeners in identifying considered DPs.
The results are analysed and discussed with respect to
pragmatic functions and prosodic patterns.
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