Disfluency #

In oral language, speakers form sentences while speaking, which means that sometimes they might search for words while speaking.

They may repeat a word until they find the right one, or they may try with one word and then decide to change it.

Repetitions and reformulations #

To analyse repetition or reformulation, we use the relation conj:dicto.

French

The conj:dicto relation applies also when the linked words are not the same.

French

pattern { X -[conj:dicto]-> Y }

Unfinished constructions #

Sometimes speakers utter a half-finished construction. In this case, a word cannot be attached to its head, because the speaker decided not to say it.

French

In this example, the construction Je lis son le portrait de notre de votre héros (English: I’im reading his the portrayal of our of your hero). This construction causes some issues because we cannot attach the word notre to its semantic head héros because of the presence of the second de.

If the sentence was portrait de notre votre héros (English: portrayal of our your hero) we could use the conj:dicto relation to attach votre to notre.

French

In these cases, we prefer to attach the two words de with a conj:dicto relation and link the word notre to the first de as an incomplete object - comp:obj@scrap.

Below we can see an example when a speaker starts with one word, then decides it doesn’t fit and searches for a more fitting word.

French

pattern { X -[deep=scrap]-> Y }