Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Signalling Text Organisation: Introduction to the Special Issue

International audienceTexts are organised wholes. Understanding a text entails constructing a representation of its organisation. Several research domains, with different assumptions and objectives, have taken an interest in the devices which seem to help readers in this process. As a consequence, research concerned with the signalling of text organisation is far from constituting a unified field. The notion of signal itself may be associated with different key concepts according to discipline and theoretical underpinning: document structure, discourse organisation, layout structure, text architecture, etc. As far as function is concerned, signals may be seen as discourse construction devices, as metadiscourse, as reading or processing instructions, as traces of the writer's cognitive processes, as cues revealing the author's intentions... This special issue, which follows on from the MAD 2010 workshop in Moissac (http://w3.workshop-mad2010.univ-tlse2.fr), is a first step towards the development of multidisciplinary approaches: by bringing together perspectives from different disciplines interested in the signalling of text organisation --linguists, computational linguists, psycholinguists, educational/cognitive psychologists, document designers-- we aim to contribute to mutual understanding and cross-fertilisation. We urge readers to resist the temptation to stay smugly within their own field, and invite them to find out what research in other disciplines brings up in relation to text organisation signals