French Adverbial Puis between Temporal Structure and Discourse Structure

Abstract

It has been shown in the literature that tense, aspect and world knowledge (also called common or shared knowledge) all play a role in determining the global temporal structure of a text as well as its discourse structure (Caenepeel and Moens, 1994; Kamp and Rohrer, 1983; Lascarides and Asher, 1993). In this paper we focus on the role of the French connective puis (then, afterwards) and its intersentential semantics. The objective is to give an account of the way this temporal connective interacts with discourse relations and thus bring a new contribution to the