Is pragmatics of discourse possible?

This paper is about discourse and pragmatics. It presents the fundamental claims Anne Reboul and I have extensively developed in a book published in 1998 (Reboul & Moeschler 1998). In this book, we claim that discourse is not a linguistic unit, but a pragmatic one, that is, an emergent 1 unit and not an emergent 2 unit like utterances. I present the basic assumptions of discourse pragmatic (coherence is an effect of the accessibility to a global hypothesis) and show how current researches in theoretical and experimental pragmatics can give new directions for discourse pragmatics. I illustrated that point with a central issue for discourse coherence, that is, temporal reference and inferences