In this paper, we aim to enhance our understanding about the processing of implicit and explicit temporal chronological relations by investigating the roles of temporal connectives and verbal tenses, separately and in interaction. In particular, we investigate how two temporal connectives (ensuite and puis, both meaning ‘then’) and two verbal tenses expressing past time (the simple and compound past) act as processing instructions for chronological relations in French. Theoretical studies have suggested that the simple past encodes the instruction to relate events sequentially, unlike the more flexible compound past, which does not. Using an online experiment with a self-paced reading task, we show that these temporal connectives facilitate the processing of chronological relations when they are expressed with both verbal tenses, and that no significant difference is found between the two verbal tenses, nor between the two connectives. By means of an offline experiment with an evaluation task, we find, contrary to previous studies, that comprehenders prefer chronological relations to be overtly marked rather than implicitly expressed, and prefer to use the connective puis in particular. Furthermore, comprehenders prefer it when these relations are expressed using the compound past, rather than the simple past. Instead of using the continuity hypothesis (Segal et al. 1991, Murray 1997) to explain the processing of temporal relations, we conclude that a more accurate explanation considers a cluster of factors including linguistic knowledge (connectives, tenses, grammatical and lexical aspect) and world knowledge.

In this paper, I investigate experimentally the question of subjectivity and its supposed triggering by the categories of tense and grammatical aspect. The study is carried out in the relevance theoretic pragmatic framework, which assumes that certain linguistic expressions encode procedural information constraining the determination of the explicit content of an utterance (that is, the explicature), and of the implicatures (that is, implicit premises and implicit conclusions). In the current state of the art, the notion of subjectivity, which roughly means the expression of a point of view or perspective, has been correlated to a series of linguistic expressions, such as deictic elements (personal, spatial, temporal), grammatical aspect and connectives. Here, I examine the relation between subjectivity and two parameters of temporal reference: verbal tenses and grammatical aspect. Annotation experiments were carried out on corpus data in English, French and Serbian in order to test whether native speakers are able to consciously identify and evaluate information about subjectivity in corpus data. Based on the results of these experiments and using the notion of (specific) procedural versus general (pragmatic) inference, I discuss the status of subjectivity as semantic (encoded procedural information) or pragmatic (general inferential) information, and give evidence in favour of the latter.

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