ABSTRACT
Without a level of semantic macrostructures people are unable to account for various properties of ‘global meanings’ of a discourse. Discourse in natural language is not only a grammatical object but an utterance at the same time that may function as a social action. Sequences of speech acts, expressed by subsequent utterances of sentences of a discourse, may also be organized at a global level, as macro-speech acts. Since discourse relations and especially those we need in order to derive macrostructures are primarily semantic, we further abstract from syntactic and morphophonological, or ‘surface’ structures, of sentences and focus attention on their semantic or ‘underlying’ structures. The conditional relation operates both ‘backward’ and ‘forward.’ On the one hand people may say that an event causes another event; on the other hand they say that an event is a consequence of or is caused by another event.
