Word fragments and repeats in spontaneous spoken French

Sandrine Henry (1) , Sandrine Pallaud (2)

1 DELIC - DEscription Linguistique Informatisée sur Corpus
2 LPL - Laboratoire Parole et Langage

This paper presents the results of a study conducted on the interaction of two disfluencies: repeats and word fragments. It is based on 150 repeated word fragments (e.g., "on le re- re- revendique encore une fois") extracted from a one-million-word corpus of spoken French. Word fragments such as: "notre métier spé- spécifique", are, like repeats (e.g., "vous avez évalué le le montant des dégâts"), very frequent events in spoken language: on average, there is 1 word fragment every 50 seconds , 1 repeat every 17 seconds. Speakers and listeners alike are generally unaware of these phenomena as if they were not part of the communication process. They seldom trigger a metalinguistic reaction from the speaker and are even more rarely acknowledged by the listener. These phenomena have sometimes been interpreted as 'errors' in the communication process, like slips of the tongue [6]. Word fragments and repeats encompass different categories of phenomena, and this enables us to define them as an heterogeneous group ruled by different types of constraints and mechanisms . This analysis rests on the following criteria: structural aspects of the repeat, types of word fragments, morphological and syntactic aspects. Analyses of these repeated of identical word fragments from two different angles - that of the repeats and then that of the word fragments - confirm the relevance of the distinction between these two types of disfluencies.

Mots clés: word fragment and repetition; spontaneous spoken french

Domaines: Linguistique; Psychologie

Sandrine Henry, Sandrine Pallaud. Word fragments and repeats in spontaneous spoken French. Disfluency in Spontaneous Speech Workshop (DiSS'03), Jul 2003, Göteborg, Sweden. pp.77-80. ⟨hal-00283726⟩