ETRW on Dialogue and Prosody September 1-3, 1999 Veldhoven, The Netherlands

Prosodic Correlates of Discourse Markers in Dialogue

Petra Hansson

Department of Linguistics and Phonetics, Lund University, Sweden

This study reports on the Swedish discourse markers men ‘but’/‘and’ and sa ‘so’, their functions and prosodic correlates in dialogue. The purpose of the investigation is to get a better understanding of how discourse markers together with their prosodic characteristics signal the beginning of a new topic, a return to a previous topic, and different kinds of dialogue moves. The possibility of using prosody to automatically detect discourse markers is discussed. The results are compared with results from an earlier study on Swedish discourse markers in monologue.

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Bibliographic reference.  Hansson, Petra (1999): "Prosodic correlates of discourse markers in dialogue", In DIAPRO-1999, 99-104.