The medium we use to communicate (oral, written, or even gestural) plays an important role in the way we structure and organize our discourse. To do this, we can draw on linguistic markers, such as connectives, discourse markers or frame markers, or on (marked) information structure constructions. What is the impact of the nature of the medium (spoken vs. written vs. gestural) and of the style of the discourse at hand (formal vs. informal) on the choice of one linguistic expression over the other? While medium seems to play a role in the discrimination between text types (e.g., casual coffee conversation between colleagues, business meeting, e-novel), it is less clear what the potential impact is of extra-linguistic parameters, such as emotional weight or spatiotemporal distance between the interlocutors, on the structuring of those texts. These questions bring us face to face with the limits of the traditional dichotomic representation opposing speech and writing on the sole basis of the medium at hand. The contributions in this volume follow the suggestion to consider discourse structure not only from the perspective of variation between the written and the spoken mode, but also from the perspective of variation on a continuum from formal to informal ways of communicating.
Introduction 11
Catherine BOLLY & Liesbeth DEGAND
Causal constructions in speech 17
Maria Josep CUENCA
The emergence of discourse connectives in discourse constructions 33
Diana M. LEWIS
Syntactic complexity in discourse production across different text types 51
Dorit RAVID
Comparaison écrit/ oral de au fond en français moderne 67
Noalig TANGUY & Laure SARDA
Questions de variation : autour de quelques locutions méconnues de l'oral, 81
niveau, par rapport à, en termes de
Juliette DELAHAIE & Danièle FLAMENT-BOISTRANCOURT
Le participe présent adjoint en position polaire comme marqueur de 95
structuration du discours à l'oral et à l’écrit
Eva HAVU & Michel PIERRARD
Italian reformulation markers: a study on spoken and written language 113
Federica CIABARRI
A stylistic continuum of speech, CMC and writing: a comparative linguistic 129
analysis of Japanese texts
Yukiko NISHIMURA
Oral/ écrit dans l’émergence de la mémoire auditive partagée 143
Tea PRŠIR
Etude d’une variation sans suite : le cas de pieça et des locutions adverbiales 153
de temps basées sur le quantifieur piece
Daniéla CAPIN
Figement et configuration textuelle : les segments de discours répétés dans 165
les rapports éducatifs
Georgeta CISLARU, Frédérique SITRI & Frédéric PUGNIÈRE-SAAVEDRA
10
Interpréter les pronoms et les démonstratifs : une opération de recherche 185
référentielle inversée ?
Marion FOSSARD, Alan GARNHAM & H. Wind COWLES
Towards a corpus of French Belgian Sign Language (LSFB) discourses 199
Laurence MEURANT & Aurélie SINTE