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This paper proposes a solution to the computational task of extracting temporal information from simple declarative sentences based on separating temporal analysis into distinct tasks, each of which has access to a selected portion of the temporal input. The ultimate goal is to represent temporal information as explicitly as possible at each stage of analysis in order to provide the appropriate information for the next stage. Because the representations are constructed incrementally, it is important that they should be explicit about what has been derived so far, yet sufficiently noncommittal to avoid conflicting with subsequent processing

this paper, is whether the domain of operation of aspect markers, i.e., their `cognitive scope', is limited to semantic representations or whether, and to what extent, aspect markers can also operate on other types of `meaning' representations. In section 2, I will show that, like negation, aspect can operate on conversational implicata and that aspect operators are not sensitive to differences (if any) in the representational format of semantic and pragmatic information. Section 3 is concerned with another type of `meaning', viz., with LOGICAL entailments. I will put forward evidence from English and Belhare (a Tibeto-Burman language of Nepal; cf. Bickel, in press) that logical entailments of verbs are in some cases outside the scope of aspect operators. This suggests that aspect operators are sensitive to a distinction between two types of contextually nondefeasible meaning, viz. semantic and logical information. The observation that aspect markers cannot operate on some types of logical entailments provides in section 4 a simple account of a long-standing issue in Slavic aspectology, viz., the controversy whether verbs like ponimat' `to understand (imperfective)' and

This paper describes results of a dynamic model of aspectual composition that demonstrates how features necessary for planning and controlling actions can also motivate and ground simple analyses of a number of aspectual phenomena. A novel feature of the model is an active computational representation for verb semantics called x-schemas, an extension of the Petri net formalism that can encode goals, resources and other features affecting aspect. Vexing problems of aspectual composition lend themselves to simple analyses in terms of the context-sensitive interaction between verb-specific x-schemas and a controller x-schema that captures important regularities in the evolution of events. The resulting x-schemas can be elaborated and constrained by such factors as tense, temporal modifiers, nominals and pragmatic context, providing a rich representation that supports simulative inference in language understanding. Introduction Since Vendler's seminal paper (1967), the co...

Introduction As the title suggests, this chapter is about the ways in which speakers of European languages talk about the future; more specifically, the grammatical devices that are used in doing so. At the centre of the investigation, we will necessarily find the things traditionally called future tenses. Since their theoretical status has been the object of considerable controversy, and since we want to be open for other potentially interesting phenomena, the delimitation of the area of study is kept deliberately vague. Future time reference (FTR) was the first of the focal areas in the work of the EUROTYP Theme Group on Tense and Aspect. Questionnaire data were collected for about 30 languages, and on the basis of them a number of descriptions on the marking of FTR in different European languages were written and issued as working papers. Much of what will be said below is based on the empirical material in the questionnaires and the working papers. In this chapter, we shal

Introduction Slavic languages have a rich inventory of verb affixes that typically have syntactic and semantic effects on the argument structure of the derived verb. Although verb affixes function as operators on verbs, they often restrict the interpretation of certain nominal arguments in a way in which determiners in a nominal construction do. This intriguing fact has not been systematically described in the relevant literature. I propose that verb predicate operators that determine the aspect (perfective and imperfective) of verb predicates also function as "lexical" quantifiers (in the sense of Partee, 1990) over episodic predicates and their arguments. In particular, they bind the variable introduced by the Incremental Theme NP providing it with a quantificational force and/or closely related notions, such as boundedness and definiteness. The hypothesis, which is supported by the linguistic evidence from Czech, draws on Krifka's programmat

This study uses self-organizing feature maps to model the acquisition of lexical and grammatical aspect. Previous research has identified a strong association between lexical aspect and grammatical aspect in child language, on the basis of which some researchers proposed innate semantic categories (Bickerton, 1984) or prelinguistic semantic space (Slobin, 1985). Our simulations indicate that this association can be modeled by self-organization and Hebbian learning principles in a feature-map model, without making particular assumptions about the structure of innate knowledge. In line with results from Li (1999), our study further attests to the utility of self-organizing neural networks in the study of language acquisition. Introduction Most linguistic theories of tense and aspect recognize two kinds of aspect: lexical aspect refers to the inherent temporal meanings of a verb, whereas grammatical aspect refers to a particular viewpoint toward the described situation. For ...

This paper examines parallels in semantic structure between noun phrases and verbal predicates in constructions in which they are mutually constraining and contribute to the expression of LEXICAL ASPECT and GRAMMATICAL ASPECT. One of the main claims pursued here is that such interactions are semantically motivated: it is the nominal argument linked to the Incremental Theme role that interacts with the aspectual semantics of verbal predicates and sentences, at least in the most typical cases. I will show how such interactions, which appear to be procedural and directional, can be described declaratively within a constraint-based (or unificationbased) framework. This area intersects with lexical semantics, morphology and it poses intriguing problems to the mapping between syntax and semantics. It also provides an excellent basis for cross-linguistic studies and for exploring how nouns and verbs relate to the ontology of individuals and eventualities. The data is mainly drawn from English and Slavic languages, which are compared to German and Finnish. 1

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This work addresses the complexities involved in aspectual composition by presenting a cognitively motivated analysis that makes use of active event representations. Verbs, arguments and temporal modifiers are characterized in terms of the conceptual features they impose or contribute to this framework, which employs representations of both motor-schematic and image-schematic change. By accommodating the inherently dynamic nature of temporal events and resource usage, this framework can not only make standard aspectual distinctions (e.g. between states and processes, or between perfective and imperfective processes) but also provide simple analyses of usually difficult aspectual phenomena. The representation also illuminates the interaction between event structure and nominals, which can instantiate pieces of the image-schematic representation or otherwise constrain possible interpretations. Cognitive explanations of event structure distinctions are made more concrete by illustration i...