Chapter 6. Macrosyntactic annotation

This chapter describes the macrosyntactic annotation of the Rhapsodie corpus, from the linguistic heritage to Rhapsodie’s own theoretical approach to macrosyntax. Macrosyntactic phenomena, such as dislocation, discourse markers, inserts, or parenthesis, are quite frequent in spoken French. The major unit of this level is the illocutionary unit, the main component of which is the nucleus, bearing the illocutionary force. Three kinds of peripheral components are considered: adnuclei, openers, and associated nuclei, including discourse markers. The different types of relationships between illocutionary units – contiguity, hierarchy, parallelism, and bifurcation – are discussed, as well as the interplay between macro- and microsyntactic units. We show in particular that microsyntactic relations can go beyond macrosyntactic boundaries and even speech turns.

• Affiliations: 1: CNRS, SLT, Lille University, France; 2: Modyco, Paris Nanterre University & CNRS, France