Mapping prosody and syntax as discourse strategies: How Basic Discourse Units vary across genres
(2009) Where prosody meets pragmatics: research at the interface — ISBN: [978-1-84950-631-1], p. 79-105, published
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- The aim of his contribution is to explore the identification of different types of basic discourse (BDUs), and the role they might fulfil in discourse production and interpretation. A sampled corpus of four discourse genres (political adress, radio news, conference talk and conversational narration) was annoted both for syntactic units and for prosodic units. The originality of this contribution lies in the mapping of syntatic dependency clauses and major prosodic units giving rise to four types of BDUs : congruent (one-to-one mapping), syntax-bound (one dependency clause cut off into several major prosodic units), intonation-bound (one major prosodic unit enclosing several dependency clauses) and regulatory (one discourse marker or adjunct with prosodic autonomy). Our corpus analysis revealed that prosodic and syntatic units combine in different ways depending on the genre at stake. We propose that each type of BDU represents a discourse strategy. We suggest this segmentation method shouls be used in the frame of discourse models, in order to provide the researcher with established basic units.
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Degand, L., & Simon, A.-C. (2009). Mapping prosody and syntax as discourse strategies: How Basic Discourse Units vary across genres. In Anne Wichmann, Dagmar Barth-Weingarten, Nicole Dehé (ed.), Where prosody meets pragmatics: research at the interface (p. p. 79-105). Emerald. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/242814