Form and function of the left periphery in a multigenre spoken corpus

This contribution presents an empirical study of the left periphery of Basic Discourse Units (BDUs) in a multigenre corpus of spoken French. A Basic Discourse Unit results from the mapping of a syntactic clause and a major intonation unit. Assuming that these BDUs serve a cognitive function in the production and interpretation of the discourse, we here focus on the discourse units’ Left Peripheral Elements (LPEs), with the aim of showing that this left periphery takes part in this cognitive process. In order to uncover the different discourse structuring roles these LPEs may fulfill, we describe the formal types observed and categorize their discourse functions. We show that the distribution of all elements in initial position diverges significantly across the different genres composing our corpus, and that the type of LPE varies both with their main and secondary discourse functions