Imposing common ground by using temporal connectives:
The pragmatics of before and after
Thora Tenbrink, University of Bremen

The semantics of before and after have long been in the centre of researcher's curiosity because of their relation to the conceptualization of time. Temporal clauses involving these connectives serve to give a time reference for the main clause, i.e., the event described in the main clause is anchored in time in relation to the event described in the subordinate clause. In other words, the event in the subordinate clause is ‘taken for granted’ to some degree, as it is capable of serving as an anchor for other events. This observation paves the way for a pragmatic analysis of these connectives, with a focus on the circumstances in which they may be employed in a way coherent in the discourse context, and acceptable to both speaker and hearer.
In this study, naturally occurring instances of before and after, collected from online available corpora of spoken and written language, are analysed with respect to the question to what degree the speaker can assume that the listener takes the event in the temporal clause ‘for granted’. In some cases, this means that the information conveyed in the temporal clause is already known material from the previous discourse context. In other cases, it means that, although the information itself is new to the hearer, the speaker ‘imputes’ knowledge of the event on the hearer, in order to be able to anchor the main clause’s event in time. This effect corresponds to what happens when somebody states something completely new somewhat too casually, i.e., it is (in German folk linguistic terms) “nur in einem Nebensatz erwähnt” (“only mentioned in a subordinate clause”).
With this range of possibilities in mind, the folk concept of ‘taking for granted’ is specified for the present analysis of temporal clauses with regard to its relation to the notions of presupposition, givenness, common ground, and other much debated concepts in the field of discourse pragmatics.
The analysis shows that speakers employ a range of options to convey their temporal ‘anchor’ in a transparently coherent way in the discourse: besides employing the two connectives specifically under identifiable circumstances, they also order the clauses according to discernible patterns – preposing the temporal clause only if there is a fairly obvious relation to the previous discourse –, and they make use of other lexical markers together with the temporal connectives that serve to suggest common ground, such as definite articles, anaphora, or pronouns.