Combinations of discourse markers with repairs and repetitions in English, French and Spanish

Abstract Discourse markers have a central role in planning and repairing processes of speech production. They relate with fluency and disfluency phenomena such as pauses, repetitions and reformulations. Their polyfunctionality is challenging and few form-function mappings are stable cross-linguistically. This study combines a functional and a structural approach to discourse markers and their combination with and within repetitions and self-repairs in native English, French and Spanish, in order to establish the inter-relation between these three fluency-related devices and to find potentially universal patterns of use. Qualitative coding and quantitative analyses of categories of markers a…