Abstract

This paper consists of two parts. The first part discusses commonsense knowledge about events as manifested in language. Three kinds of knowledge are identified: compositional, durational, and aspectual. Compositional knowledge concerns internal structuring of events into preparatory, initial, main (the body), final, and resulting stages. Durational knowledge concerns durational relations between events and stages of the same event. Durational knowledge can be expressed as qualitative dependencies among the parameters of the event and as its time scale. The notion of time scale is introduced and related to shared cyclical events (time units). In discussing

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