Discourse markers in French and Dutch

Description

It is often not easy to translate discourse markers, as several forms may be related to only one marker in a given language. Sometimes, discourse markers aren’t translated at all, which makes it difficult to understand which parameters (cultural, social, …) may allow their implicitation in a given language. First, the project has the aim to analyze and to classify all the lexicalized items expressing a discourse topicality shift in present-day French, such as adverbs (parallèlement, autrement, …) or prepositional phrases (à propos, au fait, par ailleurs, …). Second, the project has the aim to compare the classification of these discourse markers in French and in Dutch, in order to give a better view on their formal, diachronic and semantic functioning in both languages.