This thesis considers the role of lexical cohesion in various approaches of discourse analysis. Two main hypotheses arestudied:- distributional analysis, which allows to bring together lexical units based on the syntactic contexts they share, highlightsdiverse semantic relations which can be employed in the detection of lexical cohesion in texts;- lexical cues are involved in discourse signalization and can be used both at a local level (identification of rhetoricalrelations between elementary discourse units) and at a global level (detection or characterization of higher levelsegments).In reference to the first hypothesis, we show that a distributional resource is strongly relevant in the analysis of a widepanel of relations having lexical cohesion roles in texts. We introduce projection and filtering methods for thisdistributional resource.In reference to the second hypothesis, we provide a series of outlooks showing the improvement brought by carefulconsideration of lexical cohesion in a large panel of settings within the study of textual organisation and its automaticdetection: thematic segmentation of texts, enumerative structures characterization, study of the correlation betweenlexicon and the rhetorical structure of discourse, and finally detection of realisations of a specific discourse relation, theElaboration relation.
