L’analyse en unités discursives de base : pourquoi et comment ?

The basic discourse unit (BDU) analysis aims at segmenting a spoken piece of discourse in production units. The segmentation method consists in a two-level annotation, in (syntactic) dependency clauses and in (major) prosodic units, and a subsequent mapping between these two levels the mapping of syntactic giving rise to four types of BDUs: congruent (one-to-one mapping), syntax-bound (one dependency clause cut off into several major prosodic units), prosody-bound (one major prosodic unit enclosing several dependency clauses) and regulatory (one discourse marker or adjunct with prosodic autonomy). The function of these BDUs is double: on the one hand, the BDU types are distributed differently according to the discourse genre or speaking style; on the other hand, and this has to be verified, we postulate that the intra-BDU coherence relations are of a different nature than the inter-BDU relations