Ok, d’un état mental à l’autre : dialogue entre la sémantique et la prosodie

Abstract

The current study focuses on the production of okay (ok in French) in French spoken dialogues. We investigate the use of this discourse marker from two different perspectives. Our examples are taken from Frantext, from the French TV show "Maison à vendre", but also from an experimental corpus created in a psychology experiment involving goal-oriented dialogues between pairs of participants. On the one hand, a semantic approach seeks to list the different uses of okay in dialogue by placing them on a continuum between mutual comprehension and miscomprehension. On the other hand, a prosodic approach seeks to link the different uses of okay to the speaker's state of mind, in particular by focusing on the correspondence between the production of okay and the timescale of the action performed by the dialogue partners. We conclude by pointing out potential overlaps between the two approaches while highlighting the specificity of each of them.