Interpreting temporal adverbials
Chung Hee Hwang, Lenhart K. Schubert · 1993
We take for granted that sentences describe situations [2, 12]. One of the most important properties of situations are then their temporal locations, which are indicated by tense and aspect and temporal adverbials in the surface form. In [10, 22], we offered a formal theory for English tense and aspect and an algorithm that computes the temporal relationships between the situations implicitly introduced by a text. In the present paper, we propose a systematic approach to temporal adverbials, fully integrated with our tense-aspect theory and the interpretive algorithms, using the Episodic Logic (EL) formalism [9, 11, 12, 21].