this paper that much more detailed information can be gleaned from a careful linguistic analysis than from a statistical analysis. Moreover, a successful linguistic analysis provides more reliable data, as we hope to illustrate with this paper. The problem is, however, that linguistic analysis is very costly and that systems that perform complete, reliable analysis of newspaper articles do not currently exist. The challenge then is to find ways to do linguistic analysis when it is possible and to the extent that it is feasible. We claim that a promising approach is to perform a careful linguistic preprocessing of the texts, representing linguistically encoded information in a task independent, faithful, and reusable representation scheme. We propose a representation scheme, MTR 1 (for Minimal Text Representation), that does not constitute a text interpretation (nor does it "extract" or "detect" any particular information) but rather f

this paper is to show by example that there is no incompatibility between HPSG syntax and the semantics of tense and aspect, and that a careful consideration of the syntax-semantics interface sheds new light on the nature of aspectual phenomena