Models of Discourse Units in Romance Languages

Vahram Atayan, Margarita Borreguero, Sybille Große
 

Although certain concern among linguists about the information structure of utterance can be traced back to the Prague School of Linguistics in the 1960s, theoretical models that try to analyze systematically how texts are organized from an information point of view have only arisen since mid 80s. Scholars working on spoken discourse – especially those studying conversation – were the first to point out that syntactic theory was not able to give account of the internal organization of utterances: spoken utterances do not follow syntactic patterns and morphological agreement as they have been described in the traditional grammar, and mechanisms such as word order alternation and prosody become vehicles to convey communicative intention, modality and subjectivity.

While English linguistics has shown scant interest in this field, scholars working in Romance Languages have elaborated a variety of theoretical models in the last 30 years. French linguists were absolute pioneers, developing different theoretical systems of discourse units which had different inspirations: some authors have considered the act as the basic unit, inspired in  Austin and Searle’s speech act theory  (Roulet et al. 1985, 2001); others, following the French tradition of enunciation theory, have taken the utterance as the reference unit (Blanche-Benveniste et al. 1990, Blanche-Benveniste 1994); others have adopted a more syntactic approach (Berrendonner 1990) or have paid attention mostly to prosodic and paraverbal phenomena as delimiting factors (Morel).

Several of these models have subsequently been applied to other Romance languages: for example, Geneva’s model has become a theoretical framework for Spanish conversation (cf. Cortés & Camacho 2002, and specially the works of the Va.Es.Co. Group at the University of Valencia (Briz&Val.Es.Co 2000, 2003; Briz & Pons 2010; Estellés & Pons in press); on the other hand, the GARS’ model has been more successfully developed in Italian studies, mostly on spoken language (cf. Cresti 2000, who considered that the only base to delimit discourse units in the utterance was prosody) but also on written discourse, for which an new model has been elaborated, the so called Basel Model (Ferrari et al. 2008), and further applied to Spanish (Borreguero 2013) and cross-linguistics studies (Ferrari & Ricci 2010; De Cesare & Borreguero in press).

The aim of this International workshop is to gather scholars working on theoretical models of discourse segmentation in different languages in order to create an academic forum to discuss about the general advantages of such models, the difficulties they are confronted with and their concrete solutions facing a concrete problem. To favour the contrastive approach which is intended here, presentations should follow one of the following three lines:

1) They can discuss advantages and disadvantages of these models in bringing into light the complex textual relations and global organization of discourse and reflect upon the particular contributions of such models when confronted with syntactic approaches.

2) They can offer general considerations about changes in the semantic/pragmatic meaning and discourse function of some elements in relation to their position in the hierarchical systems of units.

3) They can deal with the controversial phenomenon of left periphery position, which is a hot point in syntactic theory nowadays, and can explain how it is approached from a discourse model.

Kontakt:
Prof. Dr. Vahram Atayan
E-Mail: vahram.atayan@iued.uni-heidelberg.de
Tel: +49 (0) 62221 54 7559

Adriana Cruz Rubio
E-Mail: adriana.cruz@iued.uni-heidelberg.de
Tel.: 0049 - (0) 6221 - 54 7248

Institut für Übersetzen und Dolmetschen
Universität Heidelberg
Plöck 57a
69117 Heidelberg

Romanisches Seminar
Universität Heidelberg
Seminarstr. 3
69117  Heidelberg
 

Iberoamerika-Zentrum
Universität Heidelberg
Plöck 57a
69117 Heidelberg