Paragraph-introducing discourse markers? The case of dit això "that said" in Catalan

Abstract

The paragraph is a key unit in written texts. However, many aspects of its discursive construction remain unexplored. In this paper we explore whether there are paragraph-introducing discourse markers. We focus on a good candidate, the Catalan marker dit això (‘that said’), formally an absolute clause formed by the participle dit ‘said’ and a demonstrative. All the cases including dit això in the Corpus Textual Informatitzat de la Llengua Catalana of the Institut d’Estudis Catalans have been extracted. After delimiting the construction by excluding non-fixed or less fixed (i.e., predicative) uses of the sequence, those cases in which dit això links paragraphs are distinguished from those cases in which it links sentences. Once the examples have been filtered and classified according to the units linked, the use of the marker is analyzed by considering several variables: (i) its textual functions (i.e. the coherence relations expressed), (ii) some relevant pragmatic features, such as the discourse genre of the text in which it appears, and (iii) formal features (position and combination). This allows us to relate these features to the central variable of our study (linked elements, i.e. paragraph or sentence). The study shows that dit això is a structuring device undergoing grammaticalization linked to some genres (namely, essay, journalism and narration). From the quantitative analysis, we can conclude that dit això can be considered as a paragraph-introducing marker, but not exclusively or in absolute terms. Dit això is better seen as a discourse boundary marker, a function that includes paragraph marking, but is not limited to this function, since it also accounts for cases in which the following unit is a sentence (not graphically marked as a change of paragraph) but an enunciation change occurs (i.e. a transition from quoted
discourse to quoting discourse). This proposal avoids the problems derived from the arbitrariness inherent to the paragraph as an intermediate discursive unit graphically marked.