Linguistic forms at the process-product interface
Résumé
In the present study, we adopt a cognitive-discursive approach to analyse the linguistic structures of bursts of production in a corpus of reports by social workers about children at-risk. Bursts were identified as periods of fluent writing between pauses of at least two seconds, and were coupled with textometric analyses of the final texts. We focused on repeated segments (RS) of texts, i.e. sequences of at least two linguistic units that are repeated at least twice in the corpus. Preliminary analyses showed that the number of bursts with identical or nearly identical content to repeated segments in the texts was limited. Morphosyntactic and semantic descriptions of RSs and bursts indicated that short and medium-sized bursts mainly corresponded to complete syntactical constituents, whereas short and medium RSs often correspond to incomplete syntactical constituents. All together, this study offers information on the structure of the language that is produced during bursts, and thereby raises further questions about the status of routines both at the discursive and psycholinguistic levels.