Form and functions of closures in enumerative structures: A study based on an annotated corpus.
Résumé
Lists have been mostly studied from a stylistic point of view. Stylisticians tend to focus on lists that occur in literary work. A major difference between lists and enumerative structures is that, in an enumerative structure, items consist of propositions: the links between the propositions are created by the textual act of enumerating, they don't have an a priori ontological existence. We think that enumerative structures have received far less attention from linguists than they deserve. For the reason that most linguistic studies consider enumerations as sequences of marked items and are concerned with item markers. They tend to specifically focus on lexical markers of successive items. However a few authors note that items are not systematically introduced by an explicit lexical marker and that a great diversity of textual elements can play the role of item introducer. In our description of the structure, we take into account non-lexical text elements, such as typographical and layout elements (bullets, spaces, indentation...) which are functionally comparable with lexical item markers. Enumerative structures are segments of text characterised by an internal organisation involving two more sub-segments: several items and a closure. The items are viewed as a "package" of clauses clustering around a specific interpretation criterion named by the trigger. The last sub-segment, the closure, is a segment which closes the enumeration. Closures have not been very popular as part of enumeration studies: some researchers use this term to refer to the last item of an unfinished list. On the contrary, in our enumerative structures, the items constitute finite series. The closure is then a segment which comes after the last item of the list. The second part of the presentation can be seen as a contribution to the linguistic description of the less studied element of the enumerative structures. The aim of this description is to show what the enumerative structures in text become, in other words I want to describe what I call "the discursive future of enumerative structures". In order to study the closures of enumerative structures, this presentation draws upon a corpus discourse-level annotated texts. The existence of this corpus and its user interface allows us to achieve our objective to discover the properties of complex discourse structures. The presentation firstly shows the different forms closures can take: Demonstrative NP, Discourse-deictic / anadeictic reference, Shell nouns and secondly the functions of closure. It becomes clear that closures require a conjunction of two functions: linking and signalling discourse unit boundaries (looking backwards and forwards).