How to segment texts in units that are not of syntactic nature

What is it about?

When scholars working on spoken language in the ’80s tried to analyze transcripts of real conversations, they soon realized that the linguistic units established by traditional grammar and syntax were not easily mapped onto the conversational texts. It was not easy to find sentences with a full predication structure, not to speak of complex periods with different levels of hierarchical structure. Even the concepts of left and right periphery turned out to be too vague because they derive from a strictly syntactic conception of discourse which focuses on formal predication relations. This difficulty encouraged some of these scholars to propose a new set of units to split up interactional texts beyond turns and adjacency pairs, but also to group together turns forming structural and semantic units.

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Why is it important?

The advantages of the models presented in this special issue: they allow for a better comprehension of discourse structure and offer an insightful framework to study textual phenomena such as discourse markers, connectives, information structure and phoric relations, from a synchronic, diachronic and contrastive perspective.