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How to infer temporal relations in discourse

This paper is devoted to the following question: how can readers and listeners infer temporal relations in discourse? One of the basic inferential task in utterance and discourse interpretation consists in inferring time direction, that is, in determining the time of the event relative to the thread of discourse. In this paper, I reduce time direction to two temporal relations: forward inference (FI) and backward inference (BI). I show that the computation of directional inference is neither the result of principles of discourse, nor the consequence of discourse type, but the interaction of information coming from different sources, that is, contextual information and linguistic information.