TEXTUAL SIGNALLING IN WRITTEN TEXT: A CORPUS-BASED APPROACH

The concern of this paper is the signalling of segments and relations in written texts. It explores the role of visual formatting and its relation to lexical and other markers. Through a corpus-based study of a specific "text object " – definitions – in instructional texts, it brings together two models of text structure: RST and the model of text architecture. Unlike RST, this latter model gives a central place to signalling, establishing a theoretically-motivated relation of functional equivalence between markers based on typography or layout and lexico-syntactic markers. Definitions in the corpus are characterised on the basis of configurations of markers, and their occurrences charted in the global structure of the text. The distribution of definition patterns highlights the dynamic nature of text: markers of a specific text object vary systematically according to where it occurs in the structural hierarchy of the text. The study establishes a relation between text objects and RST segments, thus opening the range of discourse markers to include visual formatting, and providing RST segments with a textual status