Rhapsodie

Book excerpt: This monograph describes the development of Rhapsodie, a 33,000-word syntactic and prosodic treebank of spoken French created with the aim of modeling the interface between prosody, syntax and discourse in spoken French. Theoretical foundations and methodological choices are presented and discussed, and compared with other contemporary approaches. Why is a data-driven instead of a corpus-based approach necessary when one wants to model and analyze discourse without neglecting the features typical of everyday speech, in order to capture not only what we say but also how we say it? How can one show that verbal exchange operates as a collaborative enterprise and how can the specific syntactic and prosodic markers of this collaboration be merged? The description proposed in this collective book is of interest for specialists of spoken French studies, and also for scholars who would like to extend Rhapsodie-like annotation schemes to other languages.