What Can Discourse Markers Tell Us about Genres and Vice Versa? A Corpus-Driven Study of French Belgian Sign Language (LSFB)

This paper focuses on the use of three discourse markers—namely list buoys, palm‑up and same—across genres in French Belgian Sign Language. Our sample contains argumentative, explanatory, metalinguistic and narrative dialogues produced by six signers. We present a functional description of the three discourse markers and their distribution across genres. palm-up and same are highly polyfunctional, whereas list buoys express fewer functions in the dataset. In our sample, there are few differences in frequency of use of the three discourse markers and their functions across genres.