tailieunhanh - Báo cáo khoa học: "THE INTERPRETATION OF TENSE IN DISCOURSE"

This paper gives an account of the role tense plays in the listener's reconstruction of the events and situations a speaker has chosen to describe. Several new ideas are presented: (a) that tense is better viewed by analogy with definite NPs than with pronouns; (b) that a narrative has a temporal focus that grounds the context-dependency of tense; and (c) that focus management heuristics can be used to track the movement of temporal focus. 1 | THE INTERPRETATION OF TENSE IN DISCOURSE Bonnie Lynn Webber Department of Computer Information Science University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia PA 19104-6389 Abstract This paper gives an account of the role tense plays in the listeners reconstruction of the events and situations a speaker has chosen to describe. Several new ideas are presented a that tense is better viewed by analogy with definite NPs than with pronouns b that a narrative has a temporal focus that grounds the context-dependency of tense and c that focus management heuristics can be used to track the movement of temporal 1. Introduction My basic premise is that in processing a narrative text a listener is building up a representation of the speaker s view of the events and situations being described and of their relationship to one another. This representation which I will call an event situatlon structure or e s structure reflects the listener s best effort at interpreting the speaker s ordering of those events and situations in time and space. The listener s problem can therefore be viewed as that of establishing where in the evolving e s structure to attach the event or situation described in the next clause. My claim is that the discourse interpretation of tense contributes to the solution of this problem. This work on the discourse interpretation of tense is being carried out in the context of a larger enterprise whose goal is an account of explicit anaphoric reference to events and situations as in Example 1. Example 1 It s always been presumed that when the glaciers receded the area got very hot. The Folsum men couldn t adapt and they died out. That s what s supposed to have happened f sthe textbook dogma. But it s wrong. They were human and smart. They adapted their weapons and culture and they survived. Example 1 shows that one may refer anaphorically to structured entities built up through multiple clauses. Thus an account of how clauses arrange themselves into structures is .