Anne Le Draoulec

Temporal and spatial dimensions of discourse organisation

Time is generally recognised as a ubiquitous component in the way discourse is organised: the discourse-level analysis of time has led to numerous studies, mostly focused on verb tense and temporal adverbials. The discourse role of space seems less obvious: not only is space not systematically marked in the sentence, but it does not lead in itself to any discourse relation. In addition to “classical” approaches, which all deal with connection between (groups of) clauses, we present another approach: Discourse Framing. A discourse frame is described as the grouping together of a number of sentences which are linked by the fact that they must be interpreted with reference to a specific criterion, realised in an initial introducing expression.