Interpretation at the argumentative level, like action selection in response to environmental change, requires decision-making based on context construction. By boosting the efficiency of this process, discourse markers keep variations in the interlocutor's processing context within a certain range.

The study of context can benefit greatly from re-examining some of the concepts arising from Anscombre and Ducrot’s argumentation theory from an adaptive perspective. By focusing on discourse dynamism, AT provides fresh angles from which to view key issues, such as the nature of context triggers; whether context construction is necessarily a background activity; in what way utterances set themselves up as contexts for the upcoming discourse; and the nature of the inferences whereby background knowledge and information are accessed. The (...) need for an adaptive perspective arises in connection with AT’s construal of context construction, which raises but cannot answer certain questions that are crucial to our understanding of context: these questions concern the source of the background knowledge required to understand the argumentative meanings under consideration. An adaptive perspective can offer a non-ad-hoc account of the source of the background knowledge involved, in terms of what pre-existing systems require to support their processing needs, and the information and knowledge they produce. Such an account builds on the assumptions that language can avail itself of processing strategies, skills, forms of know-how utilised by pre-existing systems, and has access to knowledge generated by systems such as perception and action production. (shrink)

This paper aims to provide a description of a metalinguistic use of simplement, one which occurs primarily in ce n'est pas que P simplement Q constructions. The two main points that will be raised concern the nature and function of the negation preceding P, and the meaning of simplement, which, following Anscombre and Ducrot, I will construe in procedural terms.