Aspectual Viewpoints, Speech Act Functions and Discourse Structure

Abstract

Introduction Most current formal theories of discourse incorporate some insight concerning the contribution of aspect to discourse structure, and many draw upon Hans Kamp’s analysis of the aspectual contribution of tenses, as well as Vlach’s notion of tenses as aspect-shift operators (cf. Vlach 1981). Thus, Kamp & Rohrer (1983) argue that the French imparfait acts as a ‘stativizer’, mapping non-stative event types onto stative ones. Moens & Steedman (1988), Kamp & Reyle (1993) as well as Asher (1993), Lascarides & Asher (1993), de Swart (1998) defended or developed related views, amounting to treating tenses as aspect-shift operators. Another, concurrent view on the aspectual contribution of tenses can be found in early works on aspect in Romance languages (e.g., Guillaume 1929), and has been recently revived in the formal community by Smith (1991). It consists in treating the aspectual contribution of tenses in terms of viewpoint, expressing the speaker’s perspective on the course of events. It does not reduces the aspectual content of tenses to aspect-shift or coercion operators ; they are not content with changing the internal structure of events, they add information of a new kind to it. Assuming that a viewpoint approach to aspectual semantics should be favoured (see Caudal 2000 for arguments supporting this position), the main goal of our paper will be to treat tenses as illocutionary viewpoint functions constraining rhetorical relations, and thereby interacting with discourse structure. It will appear that the illocutionary force of tenses is strongly connected with their aspectuo-temporal content. Our formal analysis will be couched within the SDRT framework ((Segmented Discourse Representation Theory, cf. Asher 1993, 1999, Asher & Lascarides 1994, 1998, 2001, Lascarides & Asher 1993). In SDRT, discourse constituents (formerly propositional content, labelled by terms K) are labelled by terms called π, to which rhetorical relations (which pertain to discourse structure) are applied. Under this new communicative perspective, the π labels are to be viewed as speech act referents and rhetorical relations as relational speech act functions (cf. Asher & Lascarides 2001).