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Article published In:
Models of Discourse Units in Romance Languages
Edited by Margarita Borreguero Zuloaga, Vahram Atayan and Sybille Große
[Revue Romane 53:1] 2018
► pp. 6–29

On the syntax of spoken French

Government-Units and Utterance-Units

| Parole et Langage

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.

Keywords: French, spoken language, syntax, dependency, macrosyntax
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.On the homology between verbs and sentences
  • 3.Dependency relations and utterance organization
    • 3.1Microsyntax and Government-Units
    • 3.2Macrosyntax and Utterance-Units
      • 3.2.1Unilateral groupings
        • 3.2.1.1Nucleus and satellites
        • 3.2.1.2Introduced nucleus
      • 3.2.2Bilateral groupings
      • 3.2.3Parallel structuring
  • 4.Overlap between macrosyntactic configurations and microsyntactic relationships
    • 4.1Extraction of a governed element as a Nuclus-unit
    • 4.2Extraction of a governed element as a Satellite-unit
    • 4.3Realization of a GU as a sequence of Nucleus-units
  • 5.Synthesis and concluding remarks
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 10 August 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/rro.00004.sab
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