Table Of ContentDiscourse Segmentation in Romance Languages
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Volume 250
Discourse Segmentation in Romance Languages
Edited by Salvador Pons Bordería
Discourse Segmentation
in Romance Languages
Edited by
Salvador Pons Bordería
University of Valencia/IULMA
Val.Es.Co. Research Group
John Benjamins Publishing Company
Amsterdam / Philadelphia
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Discourse Segmentation in Romance Languages / Edited by Salvador Pons Bordería.
p. cm. (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, issn 0922-842X ; v. 250)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Romance languages--Syntax. 2. Romance languages--Grammar, Historical.
3. Romance languages--Discourse analysis. 4. Romance languages--
Conversation analysis. I. Pons Bordería, Salvador, editor.
PC201.D57 2014
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isbn 978 90 272 6950 8 (Eb)
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Table of contents
Models of discourse segmentation in Romance languages: An overview 1
Salvador Pons Bordería
The Basel Model for paragraph segmentation: The construction units,
their relationships and linguistic indication 23
Angela Ferrari
The contribution of the Basel model to the description of polyfunctional
discourse markers: The case of It. anche, Fr. aussi, and Sp. también 55
Anna-Maria De Cesare and Margarita Borreguero Zuloaga
Parenthetical verbs as a challenge for discourse units 95
Corinne Rossari and Frédéric Gachet
Absolute initial position 121
María Estellés Arguedas and Salvador Pons Bordería
On the delimitation of discursive units in colloquial Spanish: Val.Es.Co
application model 157
Adrian Cabedo Nebot
Intonation and gesture in the segmentation of speech units: The
discursive marker vraiment: integration, focalisation, formulation 185
Mary-Annick Morel and Elena Vladimirska
The topologic hypothesis of prominence as a cue to information
structure in Italian 219
Edoardo Lombardi Vallauri
Initiating a discourse unit in spoken French: Prosodic and syntactic
features of the left periphery 243
Liesbeth Degand, Anne Catherine Simon, Noalig Tanguy, Thomas Van
Damme
Index 275
Models of discourse segmentation
in Romance languages
An overview
Salvador Pons Bordería
University of Valencia/IULMA / Val.Es.Co Research Group
1. Toward discourse segmentation
Since Linguistics surpassed the limits of sentence and started to analyze texts,
since linguistic investigation took spoken language (the saussurean parole) as a
legitimate object of research, attempts to divide this domain into units and sub-
units have been made by very different approaches. From macro-syntax (Van Dijk
1977) or transphrastic approaches (Stati 1991), to Conversation Analysis (Sacks
et al. 1974) or Discourse Analysis (Sinclair and Coulthard 1992), researchers have
analyzed discourse in search for landmarks on which their studies could be based.
This process is not an exception; rather, it runs parallel to the establishment of
units in other levels of linguistic description — the development of Phonology be-
ing a case in point (Trubetzkoy 1939). The reason is obvious: with the help of units,
a domain can be divided; its units related and hierarchically organized; linguistic
phenomena can be placed in particular distributions; and raw data can be count-
ed, compared, and statistically analyzed (Roulet 1991, Degand and Simon 2009).
Romance languages represent a variation on this issue: while sharing the same
interest for discourse, they pose a new question; a “house special,” so to speak, in
the international linguistics cuisine. The question is to what extent is it possible to
fully divide a conversation (or a text) without any element remaining unanalyzed.
In other words, to what extent is it possible to subject conversations to the same
process that was applied to sentences — where sentences are made up of phrases,
and phrases are made up of words. If sentences are studied by syntax; if texts are
not a mere sequence of sentences (Van Dijk 1977); and if conversations cannot
be analyzed with a sentence-based syntax (Narbona 1989a); then, is it possible to
study texts and discourses? If so, on what principles can such a study be based?
And finally, what relationship exists between a discourse-based analysis and a
grammatical analysis?
2 Salvador Pons Bordería
While the issue above does not seem to be of concern in the Anglo-Saxon
academic world, in Romance languages different researchers have taken them into
consideration, for reasons that will be made clear in Sections 1.1–1.5. In the last
years, Romance philology has produced a considerable number of works on dis-
course segmentation. What fifteen years ago was the orientation of a dozen schol-
ars is now a research perspective with a considerable body of research written in
Spanish, French, and Italian.
However, this research has remained within the borders of each language.
This is due to two reasons: first, a pan-romanic perspective can be hardly found
among Romance pragmatists; second, reluctance to quote works written in other
Romance languages is an unidirectional plague in Romance Pragmatics: French
papers hardly ever quote any non-French reference; Italian and Spanish papers
usually quote French references, and Italian and Spanish papers only occasionally
quote each other.
Three years ago, a panel called Discourse units in conversation: from Romance
languages to Theoretical Pragmatics was organized by the editor of this volume at
the 12th IPrA Conference held in Manchester. The panel was composed by some
of the contributors to this volume. Since then, interest for discourse segmentation
has spread, with round tables and conferences held at Madrid in 2013, Heidelberg
in 2013, and Basel in 2014. The groups developing competing theories on dis-
course segmentation are now in contact and information is shared: this volume is
the first time the different research groups have worked together to jointly show
the importance of discourse segmentation to General Linguistics.
The contributions in this volume represent different answers to the question of
discourse segmentation. They are the last step in a journey that started thirty years
ago with the pioneering works of Vigara Tauste (1980), Sornicola (1981), Roulet
et. al. (1985), JeanJean and Blanche-Benveniste (1987, 1990), and Narbona (1989a,
1989b). Sections 1.1–1.4 will explain why this happened and where it got us.
1.1 In the beginning, there was the sentence
Romance languages are deeply influenced by Latin grammars, which are, since
Nebrija (1492 [1980]), the paradigm upon which all Romance descriptive gram-
mars have been based. This fact, together with the teaching of Latin, created in
Romance linguistics the standard view of sentence as the maximal unit of analy-
sis, further divided into subject and predicate, and lastly in word classes. Besides,
the fact that Romanistik was the cutting-edge research domain in (most fields of)
Linguistics during the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries did nothing
but strengthen received wisdom. In fact, Romanists stated their studies by learn-
ing this classical, descriptive paradigm before reaching newer approaches. Stating
Models of discourse segmentation in Romance languages 3
that Romanists carry traditional, descriptive grammar in their genetic code is per-
haps not an exaggeration. This is why, when the state-of-the-art created by Text
Linguistics challenged this received wisdom, then a re-questioning of traditional
grammar started, which led to alternative, more comprehensive explanations.
The importance of traditional grammar in the development of discourse
segmentation theories (and, ultimately, in the conception of this volume) can be
exemplified by looking at a case in point: the classification of adverbial subordina-
tion in Spanish linguistics. In the early seventies, what descriptive grammars wrote
on this subject (e.g., Seco 1972) was based on five assumptions. First, sentence is
the maximal unit of analysis. Second, sentences are bound by juxtaposition, coor-
dination, or subordination. Third, subordination is divided into three groups: sub-
stantive, adjective, or adverbial, this last group being divided into place, time, and
manner clauses (which can be replaced by an adverb), and causal, consequence,
final, conditional, comparative, and consecutive clauses (which cannot). Fourth,
subordinate clauses are headed by specific markers, called conjunctions. And fifth,
conjunctions hold a one-to-one relationship with types of clauses: there is one, and
only one, type of clause for each conjunction (with a few exceptions). Therefore,
the presence of si guarantees a conditional clause; como, a modal one, and so forth.
In the seventies, scholars in Spanish linguistics focused attention on sub-
ordinate relationships. In the eighties and the nineties, syntacticians developed
the link between conjunctions and types of structures in different monographies
(Álvarez Menéndez 1989, 1995, 1997; Aranda 1990; Galán Rodríguez 1992, 1995;
Gutiérrez Ordóñez 1992, 1994; Montolío 1993; Serafina García 1996; Martínez
García 1996; Fernández 1997, among others). The more thorough the description,
the more unlikely the one-to-one relationship between conjunctions and types of
clauses appeared to be. This puzzling situation, summarized by Narbona (1990),
led to the following conclusions:
a. One conjunction can introduce different, though related syntactic relation-
ships
(1) Ha llovido porque las calles están mojadas (causales del enunciado — Lapesa
1978 –)
It rained, because the streets are wet
(2) Porque las calles están mojadas, ha llovido (causales de la enunciación —
Lapesa 1978 –)
Because the streets are wet, (I conclude that) it rained
b. Some syntactic relationships do not fit any of the types described by gram-
mars:
