Discourse relations versus discourse marker relations

International audienceWhile it seems intuitively obvious that many discourse markers are able to express discourse relations which exist independently, the specific contribution of discourse markers is not clear. In this paper, we investigate the status of some consequence DMs in French. We observe that it is difficult to construct a clear and simple definition based on DRs for these DMs. Next, we show that the lexical constraints associated with such DMs extend far beyond simple compatibility with DRs. This suggests that the view of DMs as signaling general all purpose DRs is to be seriously amended in favor of more precise descriptions of DMs, in which the compatibility with DRs is derived from a lexical semantic profile