On the syntax of spoken French

Abstract

This paper gives an account of the research carried out by the Groupe Aixois de Recherche en Syntaxe (GARS, Aix-Marseille University), in the field of spoken French description. Our framework explicitly states the need for two independent but related levels of grammatical description, namely the microsyntactic and macrosyntactic levels. Elaborating a twofold model has allowed us to propose a descriptive method differing from traditional sentence-based analyses, which raise considerable difficulties, especially in the domain of spoken language description. Regarding the “maximal-units” of syntactic description, our framework suggests that two different kinds of units should be postulated: Government-Units and Utterance-Units. The paper illustrates the distinction between the micro- and macro-syntactic components by introducing examples mostly drawn from spoken French corpora.