2.2 Granger&Paquot’s Textual Sentence Stem

ing to y Burger（1998）.h est in Until fairly recently，‘textual sentence stem’has not been formally used as a technical term in phraseological studies.It first appears in Granger&Paquot（2008）when they discuss the distinction between two major approaches to the study of multi-word units.The traditional approach to phraseology，or the phraseological approach（Nesselhauf 2004），sees phraseology as a continuum along which word combinations are situated.Linguists working within this approach are preoccupied with finding linguistic criteria for distinguishing the most transparent multi-word units from free combinations.Cowie（1988），for example，makes the distinction between composites（including restricted collocations，figurative idioms and pure idioms）and formulae（including routine formulae and speech formulae）.A similar model is proposed by Mel’cuk（1998）who makes the distinction between semantic phrasemes（similar to Cowie’s‘composites’）and pragmatic phrasemes（similar to Cowie’s‘formulae’）.Another notable typology，made by Burger（1998），is primarily based on the function of phraseological units in discourse.Burger makes a distinction between three functional categories：referential units（referring to objects or phenomena，or a statement about these objects or phenomena），communicative units（fulfilling an interactional function），and structural units（establishing grammatical relations）.

A more recent approach to phraseology，the“distributional approach”（Evert 2004），uses a bottom-up corpus-driven approach to identify lexical cooccurrences（Sinclair 1987）and relies on automatic corpus-based methods of extraction and analysis.Within this approach，it is not possible to make a clearcut distinction between what are phraseologies and what are not.What were traditionally considered as falling outside the limits of phraseology is likely to become central phraseological items which take precedence over single words in language analysis.

To reconcile the traditional approach and the distributional approach，Granger&Paquot（2008）propose an extended version of Burger’s（1998）classification for linguistic analysis.They assign phraseological units to one of the three major categories：referential phrasemes，communicative phrasemes and textual phrasemes.The category of‘textual phrasemes’is an extension of Burger’s（1998）category of‘structural phrasemes’.These phrasemes are typically used to structure and organize the content（i.e.referential information）of a text or any type of discourse；they include grammaticalized sequences such as complex prepositions and complex conjunctions，linking adverbials and textual sentence stems.

According to Granger&Paquot（2008），textual sentence stems consist of sequences of two or more clause constituents，and typically involve a subject and a verb.They are routinized fragments of sentences that are used to serve specific textual or organizational functions.This demarcation is a further step in the direction of providing more detailed analysis of lexicalized sentence stems.However，Granger&Paquot only give a few examples such as the final point is，I will discuss，etc.They have not made it clear the way to extract the most typical TSSs from the corpus；nor have they analyzed in detail the systematic variations of these phrases.They have not provided a formal definition of the functional label of‘textual’.In fact，some of their examples perform many other functions besides textual organization，and there are still basic problems in identifying these discourse functions.Until recently，this has yet been an undeveloped area of studying.