Beyond the Paragraph in written segmentation: Towards a Characterization of the units conjunto de actos {AA} and movimiento [M] in the Val.Es.Co. Model of discourse segmentation

Abstract

Current discourse segmentation models often consider paragraphs as their basic units. Some studies analyze the internal structure of paragraphs in relation to the entire text (Vera Luján, 2012; Garrido, 2014), while others treat paragraphs as the fundamental meaningful units, particularly in highly stylistic writings where punctuation plays a crucial role (Ferrari and Borreguero Zuloaga, 2015). Although the paragraph is a productive unit, systematic applications may encounter issues when dealing with texts such as news articles, opinion pieces, or minimally planned discourses. This includes those written by students in compulsory education or early university years, as well as non-native Spanish speakers whose writing skills are still developing. In these cases, information distribution may be problematic, often combined with improper use of punctuation, making it challenging to consider the paragraph as a complete unit of meaning in precise, replicable segmentation processes. In this study, we present two new segmentation units derived from the Val.Es.Co. model for oral discourses: “conjunto de actos” and “movimiento.” We provide an initial analysis based on the complete segmentation of 15 formal texts written in Peninsular Spanish, which exhibit some of the aforementioned issues. The results offer a set of formal, structural, and lexical features associated with each unit, with the aim of applying them in future analyses and comparing them with other written segmentation models.