Linguistic Margins and Nuclei in Discourse
Linguistic Margins and Nuclei in Discourse

Summary/Abstract: Language is made up of nuclei surrounded by several more or less important margins. The concepts of ‘nucleus vs. margin/satellite’ are identified at different levels of discourse: syntactic, logical/formal, semantic and pragmatic. From a syntactic point of view, they come as a sequence, alternating one after another, becoming a rhythm of units. These units are hierarchically structured through consecutive embedding, thus making subordination a margin that builds up a complex structure. Logicians have tried to identify a bridge between linguistic representation and the string of thoughts, introducing concepts such as subnectors, connectors that produce in their turn notions or even sentences. From a semantic point of view, the dichotomy nucleus-margin follows the argument structure, where the verb influences the thematic relations in a sentence. Furthermore, the text is organized in nuclei-paragraphs, within which we identify a topic sentence supported by other sentences as arguments. In their turns, they lead to other units similar to wavelets within a final wave, coming back and forth, taking up what was previously said and trying to form a discourse. We shall focus on the importance of the margin of a sentence that brings the nucleus a form to be interpreted as part of a whole, following these levels, emphasizing on the syntactic-semantic approach, rather than on the others.

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