PhD in Linguistics / Doctorat en Sciences du langage : 2023-2026
French discourse markers and compositionality
Recruitment process completed/Processus de recrutement terminé.
Duration: 36 months
Beginning: Fall 2023 (ideally October 2023)
Place: ATILF, From syntax to discourse axis (Nancy) and LLF (Paris)
Salary (net): about 1750 euros per month
Co-advisors: Mathilde Dargnat, Université de Lorraine et ATILF-CNRS, http://mathilde.dargnat.free.fr
and Jonathan Ginzburg, Université Paris Cité et LLF-CNRS, http://www.llf.cnrs.fr/fr/Gens/Ginzburg
To apply:
The electronic submission should include:
1) A CV of at most 5 pages, including the M1-M2 courses and the L3 (= bachelor)-M1-M2 grades.
2) A motivation letter.
3) The Master thesis and/or the submitted/accepted publications, if any, which can help the committee to appreciate the candidate’s abilities.
4) The name of one or two referees.
To be sent to: mathilde.dargnat (at) univ-lorraine.fr and yonatan.ginzburg (at) u-paris.fr
Deadline: June 27 2023 / extended to July 7 2023
Online interviews (in French): from July 2023 first week
Requisites:
Master 2 in Linguistics, Cognitive Sciences or NLP.
Excellent command of French.
A good background in formal or/and computational semantics would be welcome.
CODIM project short description: https://www.codim-project.org/object-objectives/
Dissertation content description
Topic: French discourse markers and compositionality
The dissertation will focus on a set of DM combinations and discuss their semantic and pragmatic properties and how they are related to those of the combined DM. This includes:
1. When the DM in a markedly frequent combination are intuitively close, accounting for the fact that their combination is not felt as redundant (and, as a result, awkward). Examples: donc du coup, alors donc, mais pourtant, mais quand même, et alors, donc voilà, etc.
2. When the DM are intuitively different, are they just complementary, which suggests that they introduce unconnected discourse relations/speaker manifestations), or do we need another type of analysis (see point 3)?
3. Is the combination compositional? Addressing this question requires discussing and possibly elaborating on existing compositional techniques. For instance, the current formal approaches in semantics are functional in an elementary mathematical sense: functions apply to arguments (which can themselves be functions) to deliver ‘interpretations’. Can we reduce the observed combinations to this type of mechanism? Also, in cases where such a reduction is possible, to what extent can it predict or motivate the strength of association between the DM which cluster into the combination? Why is this particular association more frequent than others? Does it correspond, for example, to specific discourse moves which play a prominent role in interactions?
4. Are there cases of repulsion (DM which do not occur together)? How come?
Indicative References
Couper-Kuhlen, E. & Kortmann, B. (Eds.). 2000. Cause-Condition-Concession-Contrast. Cognitive and Discourse Perspectives. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
Crible, L. & Degand, L. 2019. Domains and Functions: A Two-Dimensional Account of Discourse Markers. Discours 24 (online), 35 p.
Crible, L. & Degand, L. 2021. Co-occurrence and ordering of discourse markers in sequences: A multifactorial study in spoken French. Journal of Pragmatics 177, 18-28.
Dargnat, M. 2020. Subjectivité et projection : le cas des particules discursives. In Actes du 7e Congrès Mondial de Linguistique Française, Montpellier, SHS Web of Conference 778, IDP Sciences.
Dargnat, M. 2022. Mais enfin : construction et association. Langages 225, 49-63.
Degand, L., Cornillie, B. & P. Pietrandrea (Eds.). 2013. Discourse Markers and Modal Particles. Categorization and Description. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Dostie, G. 2004. Pragmaticalisation et marqueurs discursifs. Analyse sémantique et traitement lexicographique. Liège : De Boeck/Duculot.
Ginzburg, J. 2012. The Interactive Stance. Meaning for Conversation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Tian, Y. & Ginzburg, J. 2016. No I am: What are you saying “no” to? In Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 21, 1241-1252.
Haselow, A. 2019. Discourse marker sequences: Insights into the serial order of communicative tasks in real-time turn production. Journal of Pragmatics 146, 1-18.
Haselow, A. & S. Hancil (Eds.). 2021. Studies at the Grammar-Discourse Interface. Discourse markers and discourse-related grammatical phenomena. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Heine, B., Kaltenböck, G., Kuteva, T. & H. Long (Eds.). 2021. The Rise of Discourse Markers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mosegaard Hansen, M.-B. 1998. The Function of Discourse Particles. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Waltereit, R. 2007. A propos de la genèse diachronique des combinaisons de marqueurs. L’exemple de bon ben et enfin bref. Langue française 154, 94-109.
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