Discourse Relations versus Discourse Marker Relations

Discourse Relations versus Discourse Marker Relations Jacques Jayez EHESS 54, Bid Raspail 75006 Paris FRANCE j j ayez~dial, oleane, corn Corinne Rossari Universit~ de Gen~ve D4partement de Linguistique Franqaise 1211 Gen~ve 4, SWITZERLAND Corinne. Kossari~lettres. unige, ch Abstract While it seems intuitively obvious that many dis- course markers (DMs) are able to express discourse relations (DRs) which exist independently, the spe- cific contribution of DMs - if any - is not clear. In this paper, we investigate the status of some conse- quence DMs in French. We observe that it is difficult to construct a clear and simple definition based on DRs for these DMs. Next, we show that the lexi- cal constraints associated with such DMs extend far beyond simple compatibility with DRs. This sug- gests that the view of DMs as signaling general all- purpose DRs is to be seriously amended in favor of more precise descriptions of DMs, in which the com- patibility with DRs is derived from a lexical semantic profile. 1 Introduction The idea that discourse markers (DMs) like then or anyway signal underlying discourse relations (DRs) like cause, opposition, contrast, etc., has been adopted in a certain number of works on text and conversation structure (see Roulet 1985, Martin 1992, Knott 1996 for various examples). In itself, the idea is reasonably intuitive and appealing and seems empirically true to a large extent (Knott 1996). However, the linking between DRs and DMs is more intricate than is currently assumed. We show here that some French consequence DMs akin to therefore ( donc, par consequent, alors) are difficult to describe in terms of DRs. We argue that such clashes are due to the semantic profiles of DMs, that is to the way DMs 'see' the left and right argument of the seman- tic relation they denote. We offer an analysis of the profile of the donc class DMs along the lines of Velt- man's update semantics (Veltman, 1996). We con- clude that the compatibility of DMs with DRs must be studied by identifying first the relational core of DMs, that is, the semantic relation they denote and the types of arguments selected by this relation) ll.n this paper, we consider only the deductive use of donc, in monologual written speech, a use illustrated for example by Paul opened the tuindow, DONC we 90t some fresh air. We ignore here other uses of doric. We will also ignore the 2 The profile problem 2.1 Observations Let us consider the following examples. (1) a. Je me suis r4veill4 trop tard. DONC je I woke up too late. Therefore I n'ai pas pu aller ~ la r4union couldn't go to the meeting b. Jean n'4tait pas ~ la r4union. DONC John wasn't at the meeting. Therefore il a dfi se r4veiller trop tard he must have waked up too late (2) a. Je n'ai pas pu regarder la t@l@, est-ce que I couldn't watch the TV, is-it that les Red Sox ont gagn4? the Red Sox won? (I couldn't …

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