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Article published In:
Sign Language & Linguistics
Vol. 22:2 (2019) ► pp.210–240

Describing buoys from the perspective of discourse markers

A cross-genre study of French Belgian Sign Language (LSFB)

 | Stockholm University
This paper provides a description of the distribution of buoys across genres and of their possible functions as discourse markers in French Belgian Sign Language. We selected a sample of dialogic genres – argumentative, explanatory, narrative, and metalinguistic – produced by different signers from the LSFB Corpus. In our dataset, buoys are unequally distributed across genres, and list and fragment buoys are the most frequent. Apart from a pointer and a point buoy, only some list buoys have discourse-marking functions, including enumeration, alternative, and addition. On the basis of the distribution of all types of buoys, the narrative dialogic genre is the most different as compared to the other three genres. It is characterized by a lower frequency of list buoys and a higher frequency of fragment buoys. When focusing on discourse-marking buoys, the explanatory genre attracts the highest number of tokens, which we relate to the higher degree of preparation as compared to the other genres.
Keywords: buoys, genres, discourse markers, functions
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background and terminology
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1The sample
    • 3.2Annotations
      • 3.2.1Identifying and annotating buoys
      • 3.2.2Identifying DMs, delimiting clauses, and annotating functions
  • 4.Results
  • 5.Discussion
    • 5.1Distribution of all buoy types
    • 5.2Distribution of discourse-marking buoys
    • 5.3Domains and functions
    • 5.4General discussion
  • 6.Summary and conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 10 February 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sll.00034.gab
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