A macrosyntactic approach of Information Structure in Zaar

Local workshop audience. This paper uses the study of identifying clauses in Zaar, as in [1], to illustrate a macrosyntactic approach to the interface between syntax and intonation structure (IS). The concept of macrosyntax as developed by the Aix School (Blanche-Benveniste et al. 1990) and the ANR-Rhapsodie programme (Lacheret et al. 2014) is used in a bottom-up study of IS through a detailed annotation of a corpus based on illocutionary units. This new approach to syntax, based on dependency grammar and the primacy of content words, opens new perspectives on typology in which the description of valency is central. The main weight of the description is transferred from the syntax to the lexicon where dictionary of verbal valency is essential in the production of what can be called “Word Grammars”.