Multimodal analysis of “well” as a discourse marker in conversation: A pilot study

Discourse markers, a group of pragmatic elements, are used widely in our daily communication. Among these markers, well is found to be the most frequently used one in conversation. Although much research has been carried out on its theoretical bases such as its definition, functions and categorizations, few studies have taken a multimodal approach in analyzing this marker. The aim of the present study was to provide a multimodal description of the use of well as a discourse marker in spontaneous speech. Firstly, we wanted to investigate whether the use of this marker in conversation, regardless of its function, was accompanied with any kind of non-verbal behavior (posture shift, head shift, gaze and eyebrow movement) and secondly, we wanted to determine whether any of these non-verbal cues (if any) were specific to one pragmatic function of well and if they could be used as a signal to disambiguate the pragmatic function of well. The study of discourse markers is considered important due to the fact that it can contribute both to dialogue interpretation and generation resulting in a more natural dialogue modeling useful for human-infocommunications interface.