In this paper, we aim to enhance our understanding about the processing of implicit and explicit temporal chronological relations by investigating the roles of temporal connectives and verbal tenses, separately and in interaction. In particular, we investigate how two temporal connectives (ensuite and puis, both meaning ‘then’) and two verbal tenses expressing past time (the simple and compound past) act as processing instructions for chronological relations in French. Theoretical studies have suggested that the simple past encodes the instruction to relate events sequentially, unlike the more flexible compound past, which does not. Using an online experiment with a self-paced reading task, we show that these temporal connectives facilitate the processing of chronological relations when they are expressed with both verbal tenses, and that no significant difference is found between the two verbal tenses, nor between the two connectives. By means of an offline experiment with an evaluation task, we find, contrary to previous studies, that comprehenders prefer chronological relations to be overtly marked rather than implicitly expressed, and prefer to use the connective puis in particular. Furthermore, comprehenders prefer it when these relations are expressed using the compound past, rather than the simple past. Instead of using the continuity hypothesis (Segal et al. 1991, Murray 1997) to explain the processing of temporal relations, we conclude that a more accurate explanation considers a cluster of factors including linguistic knowledge (connectives, tenses, grammatical and lexical aspect) and world knowledge.

This study investigates the role of non-linguistic biases in the obligatory (verb tenses) and optional (discourse connectives) linguistic marking for inferring temporal relations at the sentence and the text genre levels. Specifically, we formulated and tested several assumptions: (1) the linguistic cueing assumption (verb tenses inform language users about the temporal relation), (2) the implicitness assumption (highly expected relations need not be overtly marked), (3) the specialized connective assumption (specialized connectives are more efficient than underspecified ones), (4) the text genre assumption (language users’ expectations of temporal relations are linked to the text genre), and (5) the text status assumption (information in translated texts tends to be more explicit than in original texts). We carried out an annotation study of a bilingual corpus (French–English) belonging to two different text genres: literary and journalistic. Our results challenge the implicitness and the text status assumptions while confirming the linguistic cueing and the text genre assumptions. So, we put forth an alternative view, according to which language users have equal expectations about all three types of temporal relations and are oriented to one relation or the other by linguistic cueing (obligatory and optional marking) as well as text genre.

In French, the difference between the causal connectives parce que and car is traditionally related to the prototypical causal relations they are meant to convey. The main claim is that car conveys more subjective relations and is also used in higher register language, whereas parce que is equally well-suited to both types of relations. In line with recent studies, this contribution questions the clear-cut distinction between the two connectives on the basis of a comparative corpus investigation with annotation tasks (journalistic and text messaging registers). Our results do not corroborate the traditional hypotheses that car is used to express more subjective relations and it is restricted to higher register language. On the contrary, we find that car has a strong tendency to be perceived by addressees as providing the information in a more objective way. Our empirical investigation has allowed us to put forth a modified notion of subjectivity which is associated with car and parce que: we distinguish between the more classic approachthe type of subjectivity related to causal relations, and a novel approach-the evaluative type of subjectivity related to the expressive use of language. We rely on the relevance-theoretic framework to spell out our theoretical proposal.

The phenomenon of descriptive and metalinguistic negation has been debated for a long time from a theoretical perspective. On the one hand, there are defenders of the ambiguist approach to negation, in which the descriptive negation basically serves to deny an utterance's propositional content, and that this takes place by default (Horn 1985;Burton-Roberts 1989), while the metalinguistic negation surfaces only when the descriptive negation cannot be applied, and targets the non-truth-conditional contents of the utterance (e.g. implicatures, its register, its morphology or its phonology). Only the former is truth-functional, and the latter is claimed to be non-truth-functional as it does not operate on propositions. On the other hand, there are proponents of the non-ambiguist approach, who maintain that both types of negation are truth-functional since, in the case of metalinguistic negation, the process of pragmatic enrichment guarantees that the full proposition on which negation can operate will be reached (Carston 1996;2002;Noh 1998;2000;Moeschler 2010;2013;2017). Regarding processing, the ambiguist account predicts that it will take more time to treat metalinguistic negation because it always occurs as the second of two steps; in contrast, the non-ambiguist account makes no such prediction, since the interpretation of negation is contextually driven and the right context will issue the correct interpretation from the start. This paper will be devoted to the presentation of two self-paced reading experiments and of one offline elicitation experiment we carried out on French descriptive and metalinguistic negation. Our findings provide evidence in favor of the non-ambiguist approach.

No abstract

No abstract

This study deals with the issue of mood choice in complement clauses in French, in which speakers may choose between the indicative or the subjunctive. We report on the results of two experiments using an elicitation task, in which we investigated how the matrix verb, via its distributive patterns (i.e. verbs selecting only the subjunctive vs. only the indicative vs. verbs accepting either mood), tense and grammatical aspect influences mood choice in the complement clause. While the role of the semantics of the matrix verb has been extensively studied in semantic studies, considering its tense and its grammatical aspect is a novel approach to explaining mood choice. Our experiments confirm that mood choice depends on the distributive patterns of the matrix verb: there are verbs selecting only the indicative (e.g. constater ‘notice’), verbs selecting only the subjunctive (e.g. apprécier ‘appreciate’) and verbs which allow both the indicative and the subjunctive, called alternance verbs (e.g. rêver ‘dream’). Crucially, our results reveal important interactions between the matrix verbs’ distributive patterns and their tense, as well as with their grammatical aspect. Specifically, both alternance verbs and subjunctive verbs undergo the influence of tense but the direction of the effect is different for each of these categories. In contrast to alternance and subjunctive verbs, verbs selecting the indicative are not influenced by tense and aspect. At a general level, our experimental study opens a new path towards enriching our knowledge about what factors play a significant role for mood choice in complement clauses and reveals that the polysemy of certain verbs strongly affects their selection of the subjunctive or of the indicative.

This paper presents experimental studies that investigate two issues related to the expression of causality in French: (i) what is the impact of order (cause-consequence vs. consequence-cause) in the processing of causally linked sentences without connectives and (ii) how, if at all, the aspectual distinction influences the nature of causal relations and their processing. Our hypothesis is that the consequence-cause order is processed faster, as it is the order imposed by the paradigmatic causal connective parce que (because). The differences in reading time confirmed our hypothesis for weakly associated causes and consequences. The experiments also showed that the aspectual contrast between events and states affects the nature of causal relation itself and plays a considerable role in the processing of causality.