A Contrastive View of Discourse Markers

This book is a comparative corpus-based study of discourse markers based on verbs of saying in English and French. Based on a wide comparable web corpus, the book investigates how discourse markers work in discourse, and compares their differences of position, scope and collocations both cross-linguistically and within single languages. The author positions this study within the wider epistemological background of the French-speaking 'enunciative' tradition and the English-speaking 'pragmatic' tradition, and it will be of particular interest to students and scholars of semantics, pragmatics and contrastive linguistics.

Re-examines the class of discourse makers from an epistemological standpoint, highlighting the divergences between the French enunciative tradition and the English pragmatic tradition Investigates how these markers work in discourse from a syntactic and semantico-pragmatic perspective Compares the markers under scrutiny both cross-linguistically and within one language, and defines distinct 'discursive profiles' for them

Autorentext

Laure Lansari is Associate Professor at Paris Diderot University, France, where she teaches English/ French contrastive linguistics and translation.

Inhalt

1. Introduction: DMs within different linguistic traditions.- 2. Defining a theoretical and methodological framework for DMs of saying.- 3. Overview of the corpus findings.- 4. Corpus findings I: on va dire and shall we say.- 5. Corpus findings II: j'allais dire and I was going to say.- 6. Conclusion: summary and perspectives.