Defining and identifying Discourse Markers in spontaneous speech. A corpus-based and experimental proposal

<p>The paper has a twofold goal: (i) to identify the cathegory of Discourse Markers (DM) and their different specific functions; (ii) to validate the proposal with a perceptual experiment. First, we propose how to identify DM and their different functions in spontaneous speech. Both the identification of the categorycategory of DM and that of specific DM functions are based on prosodic criteria. In order to identify a DM, speech segmentation is crucial, since DMs necessarily appear isolated in a prosodic unit. Besides prosodic isolation, DMs do not feature pragmatic and prosodic autonomy, but depend on the illocutionary unit of the utterance.&nbsp; Than we show that a same lexical item can fulfill more functions, while the formal cues that convey the function are prosodic ones. The last part of the chapter is devoted to presenting the methodology and the results of a perceptual experiment that tests the theoretical hypothesis by asking the listeners to recognize three different functions by means of prosodic cues only.</p>