On the disambiguation of multifunctional discourse markers in multimodal interaction

The goal of the paper is twofold: firstly, to uncover the roles of discourse markers (henceforth DMs) in expressing cognitive states, information states and interactional moves such as lexical search, uncertainty and topic shift; secondly, to identify sequential and nonverbal features that typically characterize and best distinguish these functions. Some of the controversial defining features of DMs are tested on the occurrences of three Hungarian discourse markers: (1) mondjuk (‘let’s say’), (2) ugye (‘is that so?’), and (3) amúgy (‘otherwise’) in twenty spontaneous dialogues of the HuComTech corpus. The features in question regard their contextual environment (lexical co-occurrences, presence or absence of surrounding silence), position in the utterance, prosodic features (duration, fundamental frequency, pitch movement) and nonverbal-visual markers (the presence or absence of accompanying hand movements). Consequently, the findings of multimodal corpus queries in ELAN 4.5.1 and the statistical tests performed on them in SPSS 19.0 aim to identify the machine-detectable features of the different uses of DMs and distinguish the two most salient functions of each of the three DMs analyzed: 1. (a) lexical search/approximation versus (b) contrast/concession (expressed by mondjuk); 2. (a) question as a directive act versus (b) explanation as a constative act (expressed by ugye); and 3. (a) topic change versus (b) commenting/topic elaboration (expressed by amúgy). The findings suggest that the defining features distinguishing different functions are the duration of the DM and the simultaneous performance or cessation of manual gesticulation.