French adverbial dans un premier temps and Discourse Relations: From Elaboration to Contrast
Résumé
Among ordinal adverbials such as 'premièrement' ('firstly'), en 'premier lieu' ('in the first place') and 'dans un premier temps' ('in a first time') - which are usually described as markers that can order textual matter and that can be used to mark up texts - we investigate the use of the adverbial 'dans un premier temps'. Drawing on a synchronic corpus study, we distinguish several uses of the adverbial on the basis of formal and semantic criteria. We show that this adverbial is an anaphoric expression that keeps its compositional semantics, ordering events rather than textual matter : 'dans un premier temps' is both retroactive and prospective, establishing backward links (based on a part-of relation between events) and forward links in discourse (based on a simple temporal succession or on an additional contrastive value). These links are analyzed within the SDRT framework, which reveals two major discourse configurations: either a purely temporal interpretation where the Elaboration of an explicit topic plays a central role; or an argumentative interpretation where a Contrast relation between the coordinated elaborating elements is associated with the relation of temporal succession present in the first configuration.