Rich ontologies for tense and aspect
Patrick Blackburn, Claire Gardent, Maarten de Rijke · 1996
In this paper back-and-forth structures are defined and applied to the semantics of natural language. Back-and-forth structures consist of an event structure and an interval structure communicating via a relational link; transitions in the one structure correspond to transitions in the other. Such entities enable us to view temporal constructions (such as tense, aspect, and temporal connectives) as methods of moving systematically between information sources. We illustrate this with a treatment of the English present perfect, and progressive aspect, that draws on ideas developed in Moens and Steedman (1988), and discuss the role of rich ontologies in formal semantics. 1 Introduction Formal accounts of temporal constructions in natural language often disagree about the semantic ontology to be assumed --- should it be point based, interval based or event based? We think that more adequate analyses of natural language will be obtained by combining ontologies, not choosing between them. W...