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

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 interrelation between these three fluency-related devices and to find potentially universal patterns of use. Qualitative coding and quantitative analyses of categories of markers and repairs allowed us to identify discourse markers which are specific to repair sequences and others which are much more pervasive. Combinations with repetitions vary across languages and repair types. Our findings fill a gap in cross-linguistic fluency research, disentangle the overlap between discourse markers, repairs and repetitions, and can be integrated into pedagogical materials. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.