Punctors: A pragmatic variable

Abstract

Punctors constitute a class of markers that have usually been classified as nervous tics, fillers, or signs of hesitation. The words we consider to be punctors share a number of structural and functional characteristics: they manifest prosodic assimilation to the preceding phrase; they are almost never preceded by a pause; they show a high degree of phonological reduction; and all punctors have lost their original meaning or function. From the analysis of twelve interviews sampled from the Sankoff-Cedergren corpus, we have isolated the following punctors: là ‘there’, tu sais, vous savez ‘you know’, n'est-ce pas ‘isn't it so’, hein ‘eh’, je veux dire ‘I mean to say’, moi ‘me’, osti ‘[communion] host’, vois-tu ‘do you see’, and il/elle dit, j'ai dit ‘he/she says’, ‘I said’ (used in reported discourse). Our main concern in this article is to present the distribution of punctors, within the sentence and within the discourse, and to suggest an explanation of some aspects of their conditioning in terms of the interaction of etymological, discursive, syntactic, and social constraints.

Variation in the use of discourse markers in a language contact situation

“…One other speaker in the sample had a high rate of comme-punctor use, at 44%, but averaging over the 12 speakers, the percentage of discourse marker comme as a punctor was only 12.7%, as compared with 35% for the L2 speakers of Table 4. In view of the fact that the comparison group of young native speakers was sampled in 1984, whereas the L2 speakers were recorded in 1993-1994, it is possible that the use of comme as a punctor may be increasing among native speakers, as was indeed suggested by Vincent and Sankoff (1992). For the young LI speakers of 1984, however, comme was mainly used to introduce an example (78.9% of all occurrences), as in (14).…”

“…Our definition of discourse markers and our identification of the discourse markers used in this study follow the analyses of discourse markers used by native speakers of Montreal French carried out by Vincent (1993) and Vincent and Sankoff (1992). As lexical items that relate to discourse rather than to syntax or semantics, discourse markers are of three major types: discourse coordinators, interaction markers, and punctors.…”

“…In addition, a major study of the syntax of working-class adolescents was carried out by Lefebvre (1982). Discourse markers were the particular focus of studies of Montreal French by Vincent and Sankoff (1992) and by Vincent (1993).…”

The Variationist Approach Toward Discourse Structural Effects and Socio‐Interactional Dynamics

“…Others have concentrated on signals or local small units (markers and particles) which mark prospectively or retrospectively the linguistic or the interactional structure of discourse (Schiffrin 1987;Dines 1980;Laforest 1992Laforest , 1996Vincent 1983;Vincent and Rains 1988;Vincent and Sankoff 1992;Vicher and Sankoff 1989;Dubois 1992;Dubois et al 1995). 2 Atkinson and Biber (1994) give a systematic and detailed summary of empirical studies dealing with language style.…”

Discourse Markers: Language, Meaning, and Context

“…9 For comparisons of both forms and discourse functions across languages, see Park (1998); Takahara (1998). 10 Markers have been studied by scholars interested in relevance theory (see Andersen 1998;Blakemore 1988, this volume;Rouchota 1998;Shloush 1998;Watts 1986;Ziv 1998), computational linguistics (Hirschberg and Litman 1993;Elhadad and McKeown 1990;Miller 1998;Moser and Moore 1995), applied linguistics (Chaudron and Richards 1986;Schlepegrell 1996), variation analysis (Sankoff et al 1997;Vincent 1993;Vincent and Sankoff 1993) formal linguistics (Unger 1996), language attitudes (Dailey-O'Cain 2000 on like;…”