tailieunhanh - Báo cáo khoa học: "THE INTERPRETATIONOF TENSE AND ASPECT IN ENGLISH"

An analysis of English tense and aspect is presented that specifies temporal precedence relations within a sentence. The relevant reference points for interpretation are taken to be the initial and terminal points of events in the world, as well as two "hypothetical" times: the perfect time (when a sentence contains perfect aspect) and the progressive or during time. A method for providing temporal interpretation for nontensed elements in the sentence is also described. | THE INTERPRETATION OF TENSE AND ASPECT IN ENGLISH Mary Dalrymple Artificial Intelligence Center SRI International 333 Ravenswood Avenue Menlo Park California 04025 USA ABSTRACT An analysis of English tense and aspect is presented that specifies temporal precedence relations within a sentence. The relevant reference points for interpretation are taken to be the initial and terminal points of events in the world as well as two hypothetical times the perfect time when a sentence contains perfect aspect and the progressive or during time. A method for providing temporal interpretation for nontensed elements in the sentence is also described. 1. Introduction The analysis of tense and aspect requires specifying what relations can or cannot hold among times and events given a sentence describing those For example a specification of the meaning of the past-tense sentence John ate a cake involves the fact that the time of the main event -in this case the cake-eating event - precedes the time of utterance of the sentence. Various proposals have also been made regarding the analysis of aspect which involve auxiliary times or events whereby the proper relationship of these auxiliary tunes or events to real main events is specified. We provide an analysis of English tense and aspect that involves specifying relations among times rather than events. We also offer a means of interpreting tenseless elements like nouns and adjectives whose interpretation may be temporally dependent. For example the noun phrase the warm cakes picks out different sets of cakes depending on the time relative to which it receives an interpretation. The analysis presented here has been implemented with the Prolog data base query system 1The work presented here was supported by SRI International. I am grateful to Phil Cohen Bill Croft Doug Edwards Jerry Hobbs Doug Moran and Fernando Pereira for helpful discussion and comments. CHAT Pereira 1983 and the representations are based on those used in