Cohésion et hiérarchisation des unités intonatives et textuelles dans l'oral spontané en français : constantes et variations dans un corpus de 3 locuteurs de 30 ans

Our thesis offers a study of the procedures of cohesion and hierarchization in oral French, on the basis of a corpus of three speakers (two females and one male, all of them in their thirties and living in Ile-de-France, the Paris Metropolitan area) who recorded themselves in several situations of their everyday life. The statistical study of a perception test of some extracts of the corpus has enabled us to build hypotheses about the clues used by lambda individuals to cut and to link words when perceiving the speech they hear. An analysis of the whole of the corpus was then carried out integrating both qualitative and quantitative aspects. That analysis was based on the Morel & Danon- Boileau (1998, 2003) hypotheses on the structure of the intonative paragraph and on the management of dialogue on the one hand, and on the other hand Charolles’ works (1997, 2005) on the value and impact of the connecting words and the framing adverbials. As far as the intonative paragraph is concerned, the quantitative study of the constitutive elements of the preambles as well as the different types of rhema and post-rhema allowed precise results that had been given by previous studies to underline the recurrent rules of distribution and the frequency of the marks that were observed, but also to put an emphasis on specificities linked to the situations and individual variations of the speakers in our corpus. On another hand, the research on the impact of the connecting and the framing words has helped us extract an original textual unit with a larger impact than that of the intonative paragraph: we called it the “episode”. It is articulated in “phases” whose cohesion is ensured by the continuity of the referential pronouns (personal or relative pronouns), and whose limits are marked by punctuants that are specific to oral language, among which the marks of the listener’s attention to the speech being heard are included. At the end of our research, we were eventually able to list the general clues of hierarchization and of cohesion that are independent from the situation (linking words, punctuants, personal and relative pronouns, frames, detachments) and to find and determine the specificities related to the different genres of oral interaction (narration, professional dialogue, informal conversation).