Locating adverbials in discourse

Laure Vieu (1, 2) , Myriam Bras (3) , Nicholas Asher (4) , Michel Aurnague (5)

1 IRIT-MELODI - MEthodes et ingénierie des Langues, des Ontologies et du DIscours
2 CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
3 ERSS - Equipe de Recherche en Syntaxe et Sémantique
4 University of Texas at Austin [Austin]
5 IKER - Centre de recherche sur la langue et les textes basques

This article analyses Locating Adverbials (LAs) such as 'un peu plus tard', 'ce matin', 'deux kilomètres plus loin' (a little later, this morning, two kilometers further) when they are dislocated to the left of the sentence (IP Adjuncts cases). Although not discourse connectives, in such a position, they seem to play an important part in structuring discourse. It is this contribution of LAs to discourse that we tackle, providing a descriptive analysis and a formal account grounded on Segmented Discourse Representation Theory. In particular, we deal with the frame introducer role of the LAs and with spatio-temporal interpretations of these markers occurring in trajectory descriptions.

Mots clés: French locating adverbials; IP-adjunct position; contribution to discourse structure; SDRT

Domaines: Linguistique

Laure Vieu, Myriam Bras, Nicholas Asher, Michel Aurnague. Locating adverbials in discourse. Journal of French Language Studies, 2005, 15 (2), pp.173-193. ⟨10.1017/S0959269505002073⟩. ⟨hal-00671743⟩