Discourse relations and temporal adjuncts in written Present-Day English

This paper investigates the use of chains of clause-initial temporal adjuncts as signals of continuative and contrastive discourse relations in written English discourse. Drawing on 88 examples from the magazine section of the British National Corpus, the study shows that the linguistic realization of continuative and contrastive discourse relations varies considerably with regard to (i) the semantics of the temporal adjuncts, (ii) the presence of additional discourse connectives and (iii) the degree of continuity of the intra-clausal coherence strands (i.e. referential (dis)continuity, topic (dis)continuity, temporal/aspectual coherence and lexical coherence). In light of these findings, the present paper argues for conceptualizing continuative and contrastive discourse relations in terms of a continuum with varying degrees of (dis)continuity, depending on their linguistic realization.