A Formal Analysis of the French Temporal Connective <i>alors</i>

Abstract

This paper presents an analysis of the French&#x0D; adverbial alors (then, at that time, so). Among the&#x0D; linguistic markers that establish a temporal relation between the&#x0D; eventualities introduced by two clauses, we define as \textit{temporal&#x0D; connectives} those that introduce at the same time some sort of&#x0D; discourse relation. We argue that alors can be such a&#x0D; connective. Within the framework of Segmented Discourse&#x0D; Representation Theory, our investigation concerning the discourse&#x0D; information conveyed by sentence initial alors reveals at&#x0D; least three sorts of relations close to the Result relation of SDRT.&#x0D; Alors alone conveys a weak causal relation, which we formalize&#x0D; using Lewis’ counterfactual, and encode in the discourse relation&#x0D; Weak-Result. We distinguish it from Strong-Result, which is inferred&#x0D; when lexical or other contextual information suggests a causal,&#x0D; discursive link. We also show that alors can, when Weak-Result&#x0D; is blocked, suggest an inferential relation, which we express using the&#x0D; weak conditional already present in SDRT.

D'abordmarqueur de structuration du discours

“…Son aptitude à avoir, en tant que Marqueur d'Intégration Linéaire, une portée au-delà de la phrase a déjà été mise au jour dès les travaux fondateurs (Turco & Coltier, 1988), puis reformulée selon l'hypothèse d'encadrement du discours de Charolles (1997) par Schnedecker (2001) et Jackiewicz (2002). Son rôle d'introducteur de cadre a été pris en compte dans une analyse des structures énumératives en SDRT (Bras et al ., 2008). Par ailleurs, sa capacité à créer l'attente d'un constituant coordonné à droite, formalisée en section 3, ouvre la voie à l'analyse de séries de marqueurs comme d'abord .…”

The Semantics and Pragmatics of Argumentation

“…In order to extend their discourse coherence analysis to uses of 'therefore' that are recalcitrant to the causal analysis, Bras et al (2009) proposes we appeal to INFERENTIAL RESULT -i.e., a relation holding between two events or proposi-tions just in case the latter is a logical consequence of the former (K α indicates a constituent's way of describing an event α and the arrow stands for the material conditional):…”

“…§2 compares argument connectives in English to their formal counterparts in proof theory. §3 explores thinking of argument connectives as expressing discourse coherence relations (e.g., Asher 1993;Asher and Lascarides 2003;Bras et al 2001a,b;Le Draoulec and Bras 2007;Bras et al 2009;Jasinskaja and Karagjosova 2020).…”

Lewis Carroll’s regress and the presuppositional structure of arguments

“…Discourse coherent theorists typically analyze discourses without discourse connectives on the model of those with discourse connectives-also as expressing the holding of a discourse relation but through discourse prosody and/or through 'implicit' discourse connectors (cf. Bras et al 2001Bras et al , 2009. Now, arguments are just one type of discourses and argument connectives are just one type of discourse connectives.…”