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<Paper uid="W98-0310">
  <Title>Temporal Discourse Markers and the Flow of Events</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="59" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
2 Nachdem in written text
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"/>
    <Section position="1" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="sub_section">
      <SectionTitle>
2.1 Corpora
</SectionTitle>
      <Paragraph position="0"> German The online corpora maintained by the InstitutfiJir deutsche Sprache (IDS) in Mannheim were used to collect the German data. I The corpus chosen for this study (i.e. Mannheimer Korpus t) contains novels as well as newspaper articles. After a selection process, 80 sentences were analysed in more detail.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="1"> English A first investigation of the British National Corpus (BNC) 2 was carried out to compare to the observation obtained for German. Two simple searches for the English discourse marker after were initiated. Spoken language data were excluded from the list of samples to be considered. The number of example sentences left was 30.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="2">  The selected sentences (N=80; N=30) were read and analysed regarding the following criteria: Syntax Five different structures were distinguished: postponed The main clause occurs before the complement clause (e.g. Seidler selbst machte auf, nachdem ich geklingelt hatte. \[BT, p. 396\] or he was removed from  topicalised A temporal adverbial or a clause describing a salient situation is topicalised (e.g. Schon am Abend jenes ersten Tages. nachdem ich den Sonnenuntergang gefilmt hatte, spielten wir Pingpong \[HF, p.89\]).</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="3"> noun-first A Noun (or Noun Phrase) is followed by the complement clause and the verb phrase. This construction, however, can only be found within another complement clause (e.g ..... wo die Gitarrensanger, nachdera sie vor den Touristen-Restaurants gebettelt haben, ihre Pizza essen und Chianti per Glas trinken; \[HF, p. 150\]). verb-first The complement clause interjects the main clause between the verb and the objects or complements (e.g. Matzerath war im Laden und dekorierte, nachdera er das Geschirr vom Mittagessen abgewaschen hatte, das Schaufenster. \[BT, 245\]).</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="4"> preposed The complement clause succeeds the main clause (e.g. Nachdem er in diesem Ort die Grundschule hinter sich gebracht hatte, ging er zuru'ck in die Groflstadt zu seinem Vater (...) \[DBA, p. 172\] or After I made the cut l folded back the turf(... ) \[AOR 2942\]).</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="5"> Aspeetual Classes The main and complement clauses were categorised according to the four aspectual classes by Vendler (1967): State to love, to know, to cost Activity to run, to walk, to laugh Accomplishment to destroy, to create Achievement to notice, to win The classification of a situation regarding theses classes was tested using linguistic tests (e.g. John was happy for 3 hours vs. *John was happy in 3 hours).</Paragraph>
    </Section>
    <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="sub_section">
      <SectionTitle>
2.2 Statistical results
</SectionTitle>
      <Paragraph position="0"> Most naturally one would expect that the syntactic surface reflects the actual ordering between the two situations such as in (3):  (3) After Peter had left, he went to the cinema.  Lever (1989, p. 380), for instance, claims exactly this by saying that information to be expressed should be arranged according to the &amp;quot;natural ordering of its content.&amp;quot; But the corpus investigation did not confirm this claim. Instead, a variation of different syntactic structures were found. Surprisingly enough, although the preposed structure was the most common one, it was definitely not as dominating as one would expect. This structure was found in only 33.75% of the studied cases. The verb-first structure, where the complement clause is inserted immediately after the verb of the main clause, occurred almost as often as the preposed structure (i.e. 32.5 %). And even the postponed construction was found in 21.25% of the cases investigated. The topicalised structure was found in 11.25% of the sentences (s. Figure 1).</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="1"> Assuming that the verb denotes the situation, we find in more than fifty percent of the cases a syntactic variation that does not reflect the natural order of the described situations (i.e. the postponed and verb-first structure represent 53.75% of all cases).</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="2"> The next section investigates in more detail how the syntactical structure correlates with the aspectual classes of the complement clause.</Paragraph>
    </Section>
    <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="59" type="sub_section">
      <SectionTitle>
2.3 Comparison with after
</SectionTitle>
      <Paragraph position="0"> The assumption that the preposed structure would occur most often in the corpus was not confirmed. In fact, an even higher distribution of the reverse syntactic structure was found compared to German, namely 60% (s. Figure 2).</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="1"> Cases of the verb-first and noun-first structure did not occur at all in the English corpus which is not surprising, since these syntactic structures are not grammatical in English.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="2"> toOie..,al'is~: 6.6&amp;quot;~  At first sight the high number of the postponed syntactic structure would seem to be unexpected, although a high number of cases were found for the German data. However, bear in mind that more than half of the sentence in German were postponed or verb-first structures  (i.e. 53.75%) which are constellations not reflecting the actual ordering of the described situations. 3</Paragraph>
    </Section>
    <Section position="4" start_page="59" end_page="59" type="sub_section">
      <SectionTitle>
2.4 Intermediate results
</SectionTitle>
      <Paragraph position="0"> The corpora analysis showed that a variety of syntactic structures can be found in written text. The data disproved Levelt's claim that information should be expressed according to a natural order.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="1"> A brief investigation of an English corpus showed similar results regarding the syntactic variation. Differences between the languages could be explained by the different word order regarding temporal adverbials.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="2"> The next section focuses on the discourse structure and what kind of effects can be observed between the nachdem-clause and the preceding discourse.</Paragraph>
    </Section>
  </Section>
  <Section position="3" start_page="59" end_page="60" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
3 Nachdem in written discourse
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The following section gives a brief overview of how temporal connectives such as after are treated in discourse grammars. With de Swart's approach in mind, the preceding context of a nachdem-clause in the 80 sentences of the German corpus investigation were studied wrt. the criteria concerning the aspectual classes. First of all, the aspectual class of the immediately preceding sentence was determined. Inspired by these data the discourse structure for several example discourse sequences is presented and discussed.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> In section 3.3 the outcome of these investigations is used to gain a better view of how the discourse structure was constructed with the help of temporal discourse markers.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> I argue that a nachdem-clause is used to provide directions through the discourse structure. The temporal information expressed can be seen as a reference back in time and discourse structure. These clues have to be given from the writer so that the reader will not lose the thread of the story.</Paragraph>
    <Section position="1" start_page="59" end_page="60" type="sub_section">
      <SectionTitle>
3.1 Temporal connectives
</SectionTitle>
      <Paragraph position="0"> De Swart proposes an analysis of temporal adverbials and temporal clauses within Segmented DRT (SDRT) (Asher, 1993). As mentioned in the introduction, a difference in discourse structure can be observed for the two discourses ((1)=(5a), (2)=(5b)):  (5) a. John had always been rather shy. But after he met H~l~ne, his behavior changed quickly. He was very self-assured now.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="1"> 3Furthermore. an analysis of a German sentence according to the to~uology approach to word order yields the following Vorfeld linkC/ Kl. Mittelfeld rechte Kl. schema: Peter u'ank heute zwei Bier. Temporal adverbials can be most often found in the Mittelfeld according to this analysis. In English, however, temporal information is normally presented at the end of a sentence.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="2"> (4) Peter drank two beers today.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="3">  Hence I will consider nachdem occurring in this construction as a ternporal adverbial and not as a discourse marker.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="4"> b. Ty and John were good friends, and they often went to the movies together. But John's behavior changed quickly after he met Hrl~ne. Ty said she bewitched him.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="5"> The discourse in (5a) contains a preposed temporal clause that according to de Swart's account only adds further temporal information to the existing event structure. No further rhetorical information is supposedly derived. The main clause in (5b), she argues on the other hand, is connected with the preceding discourse via the rhetorical relation background.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="6"> One question comes to mind after reading this explanation for the two discourses: why does de Swart not use the discourse marker bur in (5a) to derive the rhetorical relation contrast? Note that the discourse marker but is actually required to establish a coherent discourse. It is also necessary to derive this rhetorical relation, because otherwise the temporal relation between John's shyness and his change of behavior cannot be derived. Bear in mind that temporal relations a.re by-products of rhetorical relations within the SDRT framework.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="7"> Lascarides &amp; Oberlander (t994) propose an account that takes more into account the interaction between world knowledge and the underlying rhetorical relations. However, they do not consider the effect different syntactic variants may have, but provide a sound formal explanation for the example sentences discussed above. Their starting-point is a discourse that contains a state as the first sentence fo!~owed by a sentence containing a after(or before-) clause. A similar example discourse they discuss is presented in the following:  (6) Mary was cross with John, a. She was pacified after John gave her the tickets  for the concert.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="8"> b. ?John gave her the tickets for the concert before she was pacified.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="9"> They show how the after-clause in (6a) interacts with the state described in (6). A rhetorical relation is derived between the situations described by these two clauses (i.e. Background). In addition, a Result relation between the after-clause and the main clause in (6a) can be established due to our world knowledge.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="10"> The contrast between (6a) and (6b) is explained by Lascarides &amp; Oberlander as follows. They point out that temporal connectives are presuppositional. The situation described by the temporal clause is assumed to have occurred for the entire sentence to have a truth-value (cf. (Heinam~iki, 1972)). If this is not the case, the situation has to be accommodated into the reader's current discourse model. But this can't be satisfactorily done for the situation described by the before-clause in (6b).</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="11"> The example discourses discussed show that several factors have to be considered. Rhetorical relations holding between the situation described by the after-sentence  and the situations described by the preceding context have to be derived.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="12"> In order to get a better understanding of what kind of relations between an after-clause and the context can be derived, I examined in more detail what context such a clause is normally embedded in in the following section.</Paragraph>
    </Section>
    <Section position="2" start_page="60" end_page="60" type="sub_section">
      <SectionTitle>
3.2 The preceding context
</SectionTitle>
      <Paragraph position="0"> The data extracted for the corpus investigation in section 2.2 were analysed a second time. The preceding sentence was classified according to its aspectual class. Interestingly enough, a high number of homogeneous aspectual classes were found (i.e. 65%). Consider (7): 4 (7) (a) Peter schol~ seinen dreizehnten Spatz an diesem Nachmittag. (b) Er war sehr zufrieden mit seiner Ausbeute. (c) Nachdem er den dreizehnten zu den anderen Spatzen gelegt hatte, (d) ginger nach Hause.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="1"> (Peter shot his thirteenth sparrow at this afternoon.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="2"> He was quite happy with this result. After he had laid the thirteenth beside the other sparrows, he went home.) This example sequence shows that the situation described by the after-.clause (i.e.(Tc)) refers back to a situation mentioned in (7a). This example also shows that nachdem does not only add temporal relation to the event structure. The previous discourse structure has to be taken into account as well.</Paragraph>
    </Section>
    <Section position="3" start_page="60" end_page="60" type="sub_section">
      <SectionTitle>
3.3 Discourse structure and discourse guidance
</SectionTitle>
      <Paragraph position="0"> I agree with de Swart's observation that apreposed structure triggers a break in the narration. But the connection has to be made wrt. the discourse structure derived to that point. Only adding a temporal constraint is not enough to cover the meaning and function of a nachdem-sentence.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="1"> I suggest that nachdem's function in a written discourse is to connect discourse segments. The difference in the syntactic position can explain how this connection is to be made. A preposed structure triggers a search in the discourse structure for a position where the situation described by the main clause is to be connected to.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="2"> A postponed structure, on the other hand, adds temporal information to the main clause situation and incorporates it with the discourse structure derived before-hand. But bear in mind that a rhetorical relation has to be established between the main clause and the preceding context. null Consider a slightly altered version of (7): (8) Peter schol3 seinen dreizehnten Spatz an diesem Nachmittag. (b) Er war sehr zufneden mit seiner Ausbeute. (d) ?Er ging nach Hause, (c) nachdem er den dreizehnten zu den anderen Spatzen gelegt hatte.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="3"> The main clause can be connected to the shooting via narration. But, the nachdem-sentence cannot initiate a search for a connecting situation then, since the &amp;quot;~This is a modified discourse found in \[BT, p. 448\]. narration relation has closed off this discourse segment.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="4"> Hence the discourse structure has to be reorganised and (8c) is inserted in the already generated structure.</Paragraph>
    </Section>
  </Section>
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