文章基本信息

标题：A Formal Analysis of the French Temporal Connective alors
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作者：Myriam Bras ; Anne Le Draoulec ; Nicolas Asher 等
期刊名称：Oslo Studies in Language
印刷版ISSN：1890-9639
出版年度：2009
卷号：1
期号：1
语种：English
出版社：University of Oslo
摘要：This paper presents an analysis of the French adverbial alors ( then, at that time, so ). Among the linguistic markers that establish a temporal relation between the eventualities introduced by two clauses, we define as \textit{temporal connectives} those that introduce at the same time some sort of discourse relation. We argue that alors can be such a connective. Within the framework of Segmented Discourse Representation Theory , our investigation concerning the discourse information conveyed by sentence initial alors reveals at least three sorts of relations close to the Result relation of SDRT. Alors alone conveys a weak causal relation, which we formalize using Lewis’ counterfactual, and encode in the discourse relation Weak-Result. We distinguish it from Strong-Result, which is inferred when lexical or other contextual information suggests a causal, discursive link. We also show that alors can, when Weak-Result is blocked, suggest an inferential relation, which we express using the weak conditional already present in SDRT.