FRENCH IN INTERACTION:

FREQUENCY AND PATTERNS OF USE OF A SELECTION OF CONVERSATIONAL MARKERS

Abstract

This paper presents a study on the frequency of use of a selection of conversational markers in French. This selection was carried out in a past study through a contrastive analysis of French as a foreign language textbooks and an oral corpus. Conversational markers are necessary for understanding discourse and present significant challenges in both their study and teaching. In this work, we present and attempt to justify the frequency, distribution, and combinatory freedom of this selection of markers through the analysis of the CFPP2000 and CFPB corpora, taking into account semantic, pragmatic, and syntactic criteria. For quantification, we manually analyzed a representative sample of occurrences of each marker, selected according to the Pareto principle, and distinguished - manually - between genuinely conversational uses and other linguistic uses.