Interpreting Temporal Adverbials.

摘要

We take for granted that sentences describe situations. One of the most important properties of situations are then their temporal locations, which are indicated by tense and aspect and temporal adverbials in the surface form. In previous papers, we offered a formal theory for English tense and aspect and an algorithm that computes the temporal relationships between the situations implicitly introduced by a text. In the present paper, we propose a systematic approach to temporal adverbials, fully integrated with our tense- aspect theory and the interpretive algorithms, using the Episodic Logic (EL) formalism.