Anaphoric temporal locators and discourse in Portuguese

Abstract

Anaphoric temporal locators are referentially dependent expressions that supply the temporal location of the situation described by the sentence in which they occur. In spite of their syntactic and semantic variety, they all represent a time interval, whose definition depends on the linguistic context that precedes them, and inform on a broad range of temporal relations (e.g., forward sequencing, backward sequencing, or overlap) between the states of affairs described by their host sentence and by the sentence providing their referent. In addition, anaphoric temporal locators are, I propose, sensitive to cause-effect and mereological relations between situations. This has consequences for discourse structure, inasmuch as, along the lines of theories such as Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT), relations between situations play an important role in inference about discourse relations. Therefore, in order to account for these expressions, a framework involving the computation of discourse relations is needed. A proposal is made within SDRT.