"Subordinate" clauses and syntactic annotation of spoken French

International audienceThe grammatical analysis of clauses introduced by a “subordinating conjunction” has always been a challenge for linguists. Within the Rhapsodie project (directed by Anne Lacheret, Univ. of Paris Ouest), which is devoted to the syntactic and prosodic tagging of spoken French, we have been directly confronted to such difficulties, and we have had to make some methodological choices which will constitute the theme of this paper. Our description is based on a framework that was initially developed by Claire Blanche-Benveniste (Univ. of Aix-en-Provence), according to which two levels of grammatical analysis should be distinguished, namely the microsyntactic and the macrosyntactic levels. Taking those two levels of analysis into account allows us to describe most of the attested uses of conjunctions, including the most problematic ones