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? This question presupposes that 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. Moreover, I distinguish within linguistic information between conceptual and procedural information. A general pragmatic device is proposed, whose goal is to balance the different types of information during the computation of directional inferences. The purpose of this device is to explain why some sequences of discourse are more optimal than other, with no requirement of any principles of discourse analysis. The main issue of the paper is to argue for a pragmatic approach to discourse phenomena which requires no specific device, but uses the standard cognitive pragmatic framework, introduced by Relevance Theory