Where is procedural meaning located? Evidence from discourse connectives and tenses

• A new proposal about the conceptual-procedural distinction.
• Analysing connectives and tenses in conceptual and procedural terms.
• Locating conceptual and procedural meaning in relation to semantics and pragmatics.
• Analysing entailment, explicature and implicature in terms of the conceptual meaning of connectives.
• Analysing the direction of causal relations in terms of the procedural meaning of connectives.

The main goal of this article is to make a proposal about where procedural meaning is located. Procedural meaning is defined as guiding the processing of conceptual information, whereas conceptual meaning includes information about the representation of entities, for instance objects or events. Conceptual information for connectives is described at the level of entailment, explicature and implicature, and may indicate possible causal relations among the events described, whereas procedural information for causal connectives is restricted to indicating the direction of the causal relation (forward or backward). Conceptual information for tenses specifies temporal coordinates, while procedural meaning specifies directional and subjective properties of events, using features such as [±narrative] or [±subjective]. A second goal is to answer a central question for pragmatics: what is the contribution of connectives, that is, what is the difference between discourses with and without connectives? The pragmatic framework adopted, which is based on Relevance Theory, gives the following answer: in a discourse without connectives, the accessibility of the intended interpretation depends solely on the context, whereas the use of connectives allows a simpler route, reducing the number of inferential steps and helping to determine semantic and pragmatic contents such as entailments, explicatures and implicatures.