A Formal Analysis of the French Temporal Connective 'alors'
Résumé
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 tempo- ral connectives those that introduce at the same time some sort of discourse relation. We argue that alors can be such a connective. Within the frame- work of Segmented Discourse Representation Theory, our investigation concern- ing 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' counter- factual, and encode in the discourse relation Weak-Result. We distinguish it from Strong-Result, which is inferred when lexical or other contextual in- formation suggests a causal, discursive link. We also show that alors can, when Weak-Result is blocked, suggest an inferential relation, which we ex- press using the weak conditional already present in SDRT.