Time after Time: Representing Time in Literary Texts
Michael Levison, Greg Lessard · 2014
The representation of temporal information in text represents a significant computational challenge.The problem is particularly acute in the case of literary texts, which tend to be massively underspecified, often relying on a network of semantic relations to establish times and timings.This paper shows how a model based on threaded directed acyclic graphs makes it possible to capture a range of subtle temporal information in this type of text and argues for an onomasiological approach which places meaning before form. Time and TextThis paper deals with the representation of temporal phenomena in literary texts.As a result, it builds on work from a number of fields. 1 Thus, it takes as given the longstanding observation from philosophy that time is not a simple issue of days, months and years, but reflects issues of perception and culture (Ricoeur, 1983).At the same time, it assumes that the study of temporal phenomena will be enhanced by use of a formal representation (Allen, 1984).It further assumes the traditional narratological distinction between the information which underlies a text, variously known as the fabula or histoire and which we will henceforth call the story and some particular instantiation of this in text, often called the sjuzhet or récit, which we will henceforth call the narrative (Genette, 1972).Mani (2010), based on earlier work, suggests that the temporal relations BEFORE, DURING, IMMEDIATELY BEFORE, BEGINS, ENDS, SI-MULTANEOUS AND OVERLAPS are adequate for representing time in human languages.This raises the interesting empirical question of how 1 In what follows, for lack of space, we restrict ourselves to citing some typical examples from a vast literature.