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<Paper uid="W98-0310">
  <Title>Temporal Discourse Markers and the Flow of Events</Title>
  <Section position="1" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="abstr">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> * Temporal discourse markers such as after, before or while are commonly described as triggers for discourse relations expressing a temporal relation (Mann and Thompson, 1987; Knott, 1996). However, only little research has been done regarding the interaction of such discourse markers with the context within a multi-sentence discourse. null Lascarides &amp; Oberlander (1993), for instance, note that sentences containing temporal connectives expressing the same temporal structure may not describe a coherent discourse in certain contexts. Along these lines a similar theory was developed by de Swart (1994) wrt. temporal adverbials and also applied to temporal clauses. She points out that the topic/focus structure has to be taken into account, especially when apreposed syntactic structure as in (1) is read: (1) John had always been rather shy. But after he met H61%ne, his behavior changed quickly. He was very self-assured now.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> According to her proposal, the after-clause only adds further temporal information to the event structure of the discourse, since it is in the topic position of the sentence providing 'old' information. A sentence with a so-called postponed after-clause as in (2), on the other hand, requires a connection to the preceding context via a rhetorical relation (i.e. background): (2) Ty and John were good friends, and they often went to the movies together. But John's behavior changed quickly after he met H%l~ne. Ty said she bewitched him.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Previous work seems do indicate that the syntactic variations of after-clauses play an important rule for the organisation of discourse. The purpose of this paper is to shed some light on the usage of the German translation of after (i.e. nachdem). First, an analysis is undertaken with respect to this tempora! connective in a German corpus. Differences regarding the syntactic variations as compared to English are pointed out. Secondly, the question is raised what kind of rhetorical relation is expressed by this discourse marker and how this discourse marker interacts with the preceding discourse.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> One important outcome of these investigations is that the discourse marker nachdem does not only indicate a rhetorical relation (i.e. narration). I will suggest that the nachdem-clause serves a crucial function regarding discourse organisati0n. Generally speaking, the temporal information conveyed by this clause provides the clue to return to a previously mentioned thread in the discourse. This function of a temporal clause is not discussed by Lascarides &amp; Oberlander or by de Swart.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> The remaining part of the paper is organised as follows: Section 2 contains the corpora analysis regarding syntactic variations.Section 3 provides a closer look at the data from a semantic angle. Example sequences are analysed regarding their discourse structure. The last section summarises the results and concludes.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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