Disfluency and discursive markers: when prosody and syntax plan discourse

Hesitations, interruptions within phrases or within words are common in spontaneous speech. Those phenomena are widely known to be observable from a prosodic point of view through disfluencies. From a syntactic point of view, many studies already established that discursive markers such as hm, oh, I mean, etc. are representative of spontaneous speech. In this study, we demonstrate through a joint corpus-based analysis that these prosodical and syntactical features are correlated, without however being equivalent. More precisely, the lack of either disfluencies or discursive markers is consistently shown to be representative of a planned discourse.