Du coup et les connecteurs de conséquence dans une perspective dynamique

Summary « Du coup » and the consequence discourse markers in a dynamic perspective

Du coup is a French discourse marker (DM) which signals that a consequence relation obtains between two propositions. In this respect it is in the same class as the other consequence French DM, such as donc, alors, par conséquent, de ce fait or aussi. Those different DM’s impose different constraints on the syntactic and semantic environments where they occur. In this paper, we describe the constraints which are particular to du coup.

First, we propose a global description of the consequence DM, in order to emphasize the different dimensions along which the DM’s of this kind can be classified. This leads us to a first characterization of du coup. We show that, unfortunately, du coup eludes any analysis in these terms and calls for a more fine-grained description. We then show that the properties of this DM are aspectual and epistemic and we formulate a constraint which allows one to derive the aspectual properties from the epistemic ones, by resorting to the notion of omission in information states.