tailieunhanh - Báo cáo khoa học: "A FORMAL REPRESERTATION OF PROPOSITIONS"

The topic of the paper is the introduction of a formalism that permits a homogeneous representation of definite temporal adverbials, temporal quantifications (as frequency and duration), temporal conJ~ctions and tenses, and of their combinations with propositions. This unified representation renders it possible to show how these components refer to each other and interact in c r e a t i ~ temporal meanings. The formal representation is 0ased on the notions "phase-set" and "phase-operator", and it involves an interval logic. Furthermore logical coz~uections are used, but the (always troublesome) logical quantifications may be avoided. . | A FORMAL REPRESENTATION OF PROPOSITIONS AND TEMPORAL ADVERBIALS Jurgen Kunze Zentralinstitut fur Sprachwissenschaft der Akademie der Wissenschaften der DDR Prenzlauer Promenade 149-152 Berlin DDR-1100 ABSTRACT The topic of the paper is the introduction of a formalism that permits a homogeneous representation of definite temporal adverbials temporal quantifications as frequency and duration temporal conjunctions and tenses and of their combinations with propositions. This unified representation renders it possible to show how these components refer to each other and interact in creating temporal meanings. The formal representation is based on the notions phase-set and phase-operator and it involves an interval logic. Furthermore logical connections are used but the always troublesome logical quantifications may be avoided. The expressions are rather near to linguistic structures which facilitates the link to text analysis. Some emprical confirmations are outlined. 1. THE GENERAL FRAME This paper presents some results that have been obtained in the field of time and tense-phenomena Kunze 1937 . In connection with this some links to text analysis knowledge representation and inference mechanisms have been taken Into account. The formalism presented here differs from what is under label of temporal logic on the market e. g. Prior 1967 Aqvist Guenthner 1978 . Our main intention is to establish a calculus that is rather near to linguistic structures on one side for text analysis and to inference mechanisms on the other side. The whole formalism has integrating features 1. e. the following components are represented by the same formal means in a way that it becomes easy and effective to refer the different components to each others - The propositions and their validity with respect to time - Definite temporal adverbials next week every Tuesday J - Definite temporal quantifications as frequency three times and duration three hours . comparision of frequencies durations .