Où finit la phrase ? Où commence le texte ?

• Main Authors: Christophe Benzitoun, Frédéric Sabio
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Presses universitaires de Caen 2010-12-01
• Series: Discours
• Subjects: clause combining; segmentation; sentence; syntactic units; verbal clause
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/discours/7966

This paper questions the frontier between grammatical relations and discourse relations, by taking examples of verbal clause sequences, mostly drawn from spoken French corpora. More specifically, we try to analyse in which cases such combinations can be given a truly syntactic status. In order to elaborate our typology, we make a distinction between two kinds of criteria: those based on internal syntax and those based on external syntax. However, our typology will remain very general because of the difficulty of the task. In fact, every construction should be subject to a precise description.