Confirmer pour mieux détourner: marqueurs d’acceptation et modalités de transition

En même temps, justement and à propos, when observed in french oral speech, give us clues to understand the way the discourse is gradually built during interactions. Thanks to these markers, the speaker leads his way through the discursive process: he is able simultaneously to take the enunciative power back and to redirect the stream of the discourse. These markers are very strategic: they help building the discourse by asserting what has been just said and at the same time they establish the validity of what is to come. They are what we called transition operators and are always polyphonic. A pragmatic sense of “good timing” is then coming from the speaker’s utterance. This article aims at illustrating this phenomenon by analysing various examples extracted from french oral speech corpora.