Les associations de marqueurs discursifs – De la cooccurrence libre à la collocation

Abstract

The question of the syntagmatic combinatorics of words belonging to the classes commonly addressed by grammatical tradition (such as nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs) has been a subject of sustained reflection for several decades. The situation is different for discourse markers (DMs), which have gained substantial interest only recently (toward the end of the 1990s). This article takes as its starting point the idea that DMs are subject to the same types of syntagmatic associations as words belonging to the "ordinary" classes. By analogy with these classes, three types of syntagmatic associations are distinguished in the domain of DMs: the free discursive co-occurrence, the fixed expression (or discursive locution), and the semi-fixed expression (or discursive collocation). Of these types of word associations, the semi-fixed expression proves the most original and the most delicate to examine. It is therefore spe-cifically analyzed in this text, namely through a study of one marker in particular: don ([dɔ̃]).