Discourse markers in French Belgian Sign Language (LSFB) dialogues and their translation into French: a corpus-based study

Discourse markers have been extensively studied in spoken languages from different perspectives, covering monolingual, contrastive, and translation studies. However, research on these items remains limited for signed languages, with only a handful of scattered publications. Following a corpus-based...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autor: Gabarró López, Sílvia
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Estado:Versión publicada
Fecha de publicación:2025
País:España
Institución:Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Repositorio:Repositorio Digital de la UPF
OAI Identifier:oai:dnet:rdupf_______::f95f35e24413feff051d2693c344078b
Acceso en línea:https://hdl.handle.net/10230/73459
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/languages10090243
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Discourse markers
Type
domain
Function
Omission
Substitution
French Belgian Sign Language (LSFB)
French
Descripción
Sumario:Discourse markers have been extensively studied in spoken languages from different perspectives, covering monolingual, contrastive, and translation studies. However, research on these items remains limited for signed languages, with only a handful of scattered publications. Following a corpus-based approach, this paper aims to investigate discourse markers in French Belgian Sign Language (LSFB), including their types, functions, and translation/s into written French. An 18 min sample of three dialogues and six signers was analyzed using a two-level independent taxonomy (domain and function) previously applied to spoken and signed data. Overall, 251 discourse markers were identified in the LSFB sample. They can be manual, nonmanual, or a combination of both, the latter type being the most frequent. In contrast to the previous literature, discourse markers cannot be spatial in LSFB. Regarding their functional spectrum, most discourse markers belong to the sequential domain (i.e., they are mostly used to structure discourse) and express `addition' (i.e., providing more information) or `monitoring' (i.e., keeping control over one's turn or over the interaction). When examining the translation of DMs, most are either omitted or substituted by other non-discourse marking items in the target texts. Although these results are generally similar to previous studies on DMs in spoken languages, more research on these items in other signed languages is needed to obtain a precise overview of their role in human communication.