Minimal discourse units in spoken French: Uncovering genre-bound segmentation strategies

In spite of its crucial role in discourse segmentation, there is no consensus in the literature on what a minimal discourse unit (MDU) is and how it should be identified. Working with spoken data, we claim that the minimal discourse unit is a multi-dimensional unit that should be defined in terms of two linguistic criteria: prosody and syntax (Degand and Simon, 2005). In this paper, we explain which criteria are used to perform the prosodic and syntactic segmentation, and how these levels are mapped onto one another. We discuss a number of problems we encounter in doing so. We then present the results of a first study analyzing the segmentation strategies in three different genres, which leads to the conclusion that the type of MDUs may well be genre-bound