Les relations transphrastiques à la frontière entre la phrase et le texte

Abstract

Interclausal relations are traditionally studied within the framework of the complex sentence of endocentric subordinative form. However, there is no essential correlation between interclausal linkage and complex sentence. Interclausal relations are not meanings of subordinate clauses but conceptual relations that bridge saturated processes of equal rank. According to this premise, complex sentence is only one option for the expression of interclausal relations, along with text. Moreover, if we compare the competing structures, it turns out that the unmarked form of expression is not complex sentence but text. While a complex sentence imposes a hierarchic syntactic structure on a symmetric conceptual structure, the structure of the text and the conceptual structure of interclausal relations are isomorphic. As a marked option, the choice of complex sentence requires a specific functional motivation, which does not involve the ideation of the link itself but the communicative perspective: its function is to impose a layered communicative perspective on the connexion, which is distributed between foreground and background information.