Prosodic forms and pragmatic meanings: The case of the discourse marker ‘no’ in Slovak

This paper provides a first analysis of the Slovak word [no] that is extremely ambiguous in terms of pragmatic and discourse functions and can correspond to ‘okay’, ‘yes’, ‘well’, ‘mhm’, ‘so’, and others. We report that the function of backchannel/continuer is the most easily disambiguated by the pitch contour, duration, and other features. Other functions, while also frequent in our corpus, require more sophisticated multi-factor analyses for identifying best disambiguating features.