The hotchpotch of buoys: A corpus study on their use across genres and their discourse functions in French Belgian Sign Language (LSFB)

This paper aims to take a step further in the study of buoys by exploring their use across genres and their role at the discourse level in French Belgian Sign Language (LSFB). The commonly accepted idea that all buoys work at the discourse level is questioned here because the notion of ‘buoys’ conflates many different forms in which the common feature is that one hand is held while the other continues signing. Our results prove that genre makes a difference when it comes to the use of some buoys and that the extension through the discourse and function of some list buoys differ from the other types. Furthermore, we propose a classification of the different categories where only some list buoys have a discourse marker status: fragment, pointer, point and theme buoys establish topic relations; whereas depicting and delimit buoys do not participate in the organisation of the discourse.