Temporal Relations at the Sentence and Text Genre Level: The Role of Linguistic Cueing and Non-linguistic Biases—An Annotation Study of a Bilingual Corpus

This study investigates the role of non-linguistic biases in the obligatory (verb tenses) and optional (discourse connectives) linguistic marking for inferring temporal relations at the sentence and the text genre levels. Specifically, we formulated and tested several assumptions: (1) the linguistic cueing assumption (verb tenses inform language users about the temporal relation), (2) the implicitness assumption (highly expected relations need not be overtly marked), (3) the specialized connective assumption (specialized connectives are more efficient than underspecified ones), (4) the text genre assumption (language users’ expectations of temporal relations are linked to the text genre), and (5) the text status assumption (information in translated texts tends to be more explicit than in original texts). We carried out an annotation study of a bilingual corpus (French–English) belonging to two different text genres: literary and journalistic. Our results challenge the implicitness and the text status assumptions while confirming the linguistic cueing and the text genre assumptions. So, we put forth an alternative view, according to which language users have equal expectations about all three types of temporal relations and are oriented to one relation or the other by linguistic cueing (obligatory and optional marking) as well as text genre.