Cover not available
Part of
Rhapsodie: A prosodic and syntactic treebank for spoken French
Edited by Anne Lacheret-Dujour, Sylvain Kahane and Paola Pietrandrea
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 89] 2019
► pp. 285–314

Chapter 16
Macrosyntax at work

Functions and distribution of macrosyntactic patterns in the Rhapsodie corpus

| CNRS, SLT, Lille University, France
| François Rabelais University, Tours, France

In this chapter we conduct a quantitative analysis of the distribution of macrosyntactic structures in the Rhapsodie corpus. The analysis shows that there is a strong tendency to massively reuse only a small number of macrosyntactic patterns and that simple utterances predominate in the corpus. The analysis also shows that French spoken discourse is not at all characterized by the lack of microsyntactic cohesion, as is usually claimed. Rather than a strategy used to compensate for an alleged lack of microsyntactic cohesion in spoken discourse, macrosyntax is better regarded as an additional level of cohesion that ensures the interface between the internal structure of an utterance and the global structure of the discourse in which that utterance occurs.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Macrosyntactic complexity
  • 3.The macrosyntactic patterns identified in the corpus
  • 4.Microsyntactic aspects of the most frequent macrosyntactic patterns
    • 4.1The microsyntactic nature of simple // IUs
    • 4.2The microsyntactic relation between the nucleus and the pre-nucleus in <// IUs
    • 4.3The microsyntactic relation between the nucleus and the pre-nucleus in </</ IUs
    • 4.4The microsyntactic relation between the nucleus and the post-nucleus in >// IUs
    • 4.5The microsyntactic relation between the nucleus and the in-nucleus in ()// IUs
    • 4.6The microsyntactic internal cohesion of IUs
    • 4.7Verb-headed GUs
    • 4.8The relatively low incidence of microsyntactically incomplete IUs
    • 4.9The role of microsyntax in spoken French
    • 4.10Dependency representation and the role of microsyntax in spoken productions
  • 5.Semantic aspects of the most frequent macrosyntactic patterns
    • 5.1The semantic relation between the pre-nucleus and the nucleus in <// IUs
    • 5.2The semantic relation between the pre-nuclei and the nucleus in <<// IUs
    • 5.3The semantic relation between the nucleus and the post-nucleus in > // IUs
    • 5.4The semantic relation between the in-nucleus and the nucleus in ()//IUs
    • 5.5The correlation between the semantic function and the linear position of ad-nuclear constituents
  • 6.The discursive functions of the most frequent macrosyntactic patterns
    • 6.1Macrosyntactic patterns across situational variables
    • 6.2The repetition of macrosyntactic structures and the internal organization of discourse
  • 7.Conclusions
  • Notes
Published online: 6 June 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.89.17pie
Cited by

Cited by 1 other publications

Lacheret-Dujour, Anne, Guillaume Desagulier, Mathilde de Saint-Léger, Karin Heidlmayr & Frédéric Isel
2023. The syntactic marking of emotional intensity: Psycholinguistic evidence from French. Lingua 294 ► pp. 103570 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 23 march 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.