Punctors: A pragmatic variable

Punctors constitute a class of markers that have usually been classified as nervous tics, fillers, or signs of hesitation. The words we consider to be punctors share a number of structural and functional characteristics: they manifest prosodic assimilation to the preceding phrase; they are almost never preceded by a pause; they show a high degree of phonological reduction; and all punctors have lost their original meaning or function. From the analysis of twelve interviews sampled from the Sankoff-Cedergren corpus, we have isolated the following punctors: la 'there', tu sais, vous savez 'you know', n'est-ce pas 'isn't it so', hein 'eh', je veux dire 'I mean to say', moi 'me', osti '[communion] host', vois-tu 'do you see', and il/elle dit, j'ai dit 'he/she says', 'I said' (used in reported discourse). Our main concern in this article is to present the distribution of punctors, within the sentence and within the discourse, and to suggest an explanation of some aspects of their conditioning in terms of the interaction of etymological, discursive, syntactic, and social constraints. In recent years, discourse analysts have tried to work out structures and organization specific to spoken language, including prosodic features (Guy, Horvath, Vonwiller, Daisley, & Rogers, 1986) and various kinds of markers: interaction markers, pragmatic markers, discourse particles, etc. (Ducrot, 1980; Erman, 1987; Roulet, Auchlin, Moeschler, Rubattel, & Schilling, 1985; Schiffrin, 1987; Vincent, 1983, 1991, 1993). Punctors (first defined in Vincent, 1983) constitute one class of markers appearing only in spoken language. In fact, they have usually been classified as nervous tics, fillers, or signs of hesitation. Our main concern in this article is to characterize the distribution of punctors, within the sentence and within the discourse, and to suggest an explanation of some aspects of their conditioning in terms of the interaction of etymological, discursive, syntactic, and social constraints. But first we define punctors in terms of their role in discourse.