Prosodic and pragmatic values of discourse particles in French

Abstract

This paper analyzes the prosodic properties of three discourse particles (DP) in French—‘alors’ (‘so’), ‘bon’ (‘well’), and ‘donc’ (‘thus’)—according to their different pragmatic functions. DP occurrences of these words extracted from a large speech database have been annotated manually with pragmatic labels. For each DP, the prosodic characteristics of occurrences for each pragmatic function (conclusive, introductive, etc.) are automatically extracted. Then, for each DP and each pragmatic function, the most frequent $F_0$ contours are retained as the representative forms. The results show that a pragmatic function common to several discourse particles gives rise to a uniform prosodic marking, which suggests that such DPs are commutable most of the time.