The semantics of temporal adjuncts.
Ness Schelkens, Frank Van Eynde, Sven Verdoolaege · 1999
In this article, we present some work that was conducted within the framework of Linguaduct, a project in which we are trying to model the temporal interpretation of Dutch text. Next to verbs, temporal adjuncts are the most important source of explicit information about the temporal properties of the eventualities that are being described in a text. We will show how a DRT-style eventuality-based semantic analysis of tense, aspect and temporal modification can be integrated within standard HPSG. Second, we propose to represent the semantics of the different kinds of temporal adjuncts up to a rather fine-grained level of decomposition. As will be illustrated, some facts about the interaction of temporal modification with tense, and about the combination of different temporal adjuncts, naturally fall out of our analysis.