Denis Vigier

Connexion et indexation : Ces liens qui tissent le texte

This book brings together a range of scientific contributions whose aim is to offer an insight into various aspects of the research carried out in France in the past forty years around cohesion and coherence in texts. It is meant as a tribute to the authors’ colleague and friend, Professor Michel Charolles, whose many publications constitute a major contribution to the development of text linguistics in France. Special focus is given to the renewed conception of markers of discourse cohesion proposed by Charolles following his research on « discourse framing » (1997). These markers which help the interpreter access discourse coherence are claimed to be of two types: markers of connection and markers of indexation. The former, which include markers of referential continuity (anaphors) and markers of the relations between propositions and/or speech acts (connectives), establish links of discourse cohesion with the cotext to the left. The latter, which are projective, operate with the cotext to the right and enable the speaker to index potentially extensive textual segments by grouping them together within semantico-pragmatic units which Charolles (1997) proposes to term « discourse frames ».