Topic shifters in a contrastive perspective: a corpus study

Overview & Synopsis

The aim of this paper is to identify grammaticalization chains for discourse markers (DMs) signaling topic shifts. In order to do this, I use a parallel corpus to spot the most frequent translation equivalents of a French DM which typically signals topic shifts, par ailleurs "by the way". My corpus contains 587 occurrences of par ailleurs and their equivalents in 12 European languages, totaling 8,212 excerpts, which I analyzed to find the translation equivalents of par ailleurs. This allowed me to identify 126 DMs -a mean of 10.5 per language (10 for German). I classed these DMs in broad semantic categories, based on their lexicographic description, and compared the results across languages. In German as in other European languages, the most frequent strategy appears to be the use of ADDITIVE DMs such as außerdem "besides", alongside other strategies, especially DIGRESSIVE DMs such as übrigens "by the way".