Revue Romane. Langue et littérature - Volume 53, Issue 1, 2018

This paper gives an account of the research carried out by the Groupe Aixois de Recherche en Syntaxe (GARS, Aix-Marseille University), in the field of spoken French description. Our framework explicitly states the need for two independent but related levels of grammatical description, namely the microsyntactic and macrosyntactic levels. Elaborating a twofold model has allowed us to propose a descriptive method differing from traditional sentence-based analyses, which raise considerable difficulties, especially in the domain of spoken language description. Regarding the “maximal-units” of syntactic description, our framework suggests that two different kinds of units should be postulated: Government-Units and Utterance-Units. The paper illustrates the distinction between the micro- and macro-syntactic components by introducing examples mostly drawn from spoken French corpora.

The paper presents the definition of the TOPIC information unit within the Language into Act Theory (L-AcT) and the prosodic and informational criteria used for its recovery in spontaneous speech corpora: Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish and American English. The TOPIC develops the specific function of field of application of the illocutionary force accomplished by the COMMENT unit, it is performed through a prefix prosodic unit and precedes the Comment. The TOPIC must be coherent with the set of requirements determined by the illocutionary force of the Comment and adequate to the speaker-addressee relation. TOPIC mostly correlates in spoken corpora with NP and ADVP and must be functionally distinguished from “postponed Topic” (APPENDIX in the L-ACT framework). However, corpora also show a good percentage of modal expressions filling its prosodic and distributional conditions.

This contribution describes the functional properties of Italian sentence adverbs (SAs) occurring in the left periphery, i.e. in clause initial position, on the basis of a corpus-based analysis of articles drawn from online daily newspapers. We show that a qualitative analysis of the data found in our corpus (albeit relatively small) using the Basel model for paragraph segmentation allows to substantially refining our understanding of the information and discourse properties of these items. Our data suggests that there are important differences in the information properties of two classes of SAs, thereby confirming a classification of the category of SAs in at least two main categories. Finally, the data analyzed allows further refining our taxonomic model of Sentence Adverbials.

This paper attempts to establish some basis for the combination of discourse markers in conversations. The analysis presented here will be based on Spanish spontaneous conversations and will make use of the Val.Es.Co model of discourse units developed in the last ten years ( Briz et al. 2003 ; Grupo Val.Es.Co 2014 ) and a corpus of spontaneous conversations. As a result, patterns of combination of DMs will be established; some types of combinations will be described, and a distinction will be drawn between lexicalization of DMs, adjacency of DMs in two neighboring discourse units, and combination proper. In addition, some places are favored for the combination of discourse markers: the initial positions of the discourse units act and intervention. Binary combinations are preferred to ternary or 4-ary combinations. Finally, DMs with textual functions are preferred in the combinations studied when compared to modal or interpersonal DMs.

This paper aims at discussing the relationships of turn construction, interactional units and projectability with especial regard to projections triggered by TCU-initially placed items, for instance discourse markers. Supported by data taken from contemporary spoken French, the main purpose of this piece is to theorize and describe these patterns of projection and to elicit from them constructional convergences. The theoretical statement is complemented by the exemplary analysis of a French talk-show conversation in which the turn-initially placed items feature prominently in the interlocutors’ discussion. This can be demonstrated through the study of certain linguistic mechanisms of coherence on different hierarchical levels. Special focus is placed on the implicit argumentative relations that the analyzed projection patterns establish.