How to be a Discourse Particle?

International audienceOur study analyses some prosodic correlates of nine French words or expressions: alors, quoi, voilà, bon, ben, tu sais, vous savez, tu vois, vous voyez. Besides their general grammatical categorization as adverb, pronoun, preposition, 'introducer', adjective, adverb and sentence, these expressions are very frequently used as discourse particles (DP) in spontaneous speech. Our goal is to determine to what extent intrinsic and contextual prosodic properties are useful and sufficient to characterize their DP and non-DP functions. The expressions under study are extracted from large corpora, than a manual annotation is carried out to distinguish DP and non-DP functions and an automatic processing is applied for prosodic data extraction and labelling. This allows getting fine-grained and systematic pro-sodic information. Automatic classification tests of the DP functions based solely on prosodic parameters are carried out and lead to very encouraging results as correct identification ranges from 73% to more than 90%. Finally an automatic clustering procedure provides prosodically significant DP sub-classes for every studied expression