Abstract
We present a semantic and pragmatic account of the anaphoric properties of past and perfect that improves on previous work by integrating discourse structure, aspectual type, surface structure and commonsense knowledge. A novel aspect of our account is that we distinguish between two kinds of temporal intervals in the interpretation of temporal operators - discourse reference intervals and event intervals. This distinction makes it possible to develop an analogy between centering and temporal centering, which operates on discourse reference intervals. Our temporal property-sharing principle is a defeasible inference rule on the logical form. Along with lexical and causal reasoning, it plays a role in incrementally resolving underspecified aspects of the event structure representation of an utterance against the current context.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 70-77 |
| Number of pages | 8 |
| Journal | Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics |
| Volume | 1993-June |
| State | Published - 1993 |
| Event | 31st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 1993 - Columbus, United States Duration: Jun 22 1993 → Jun 26 1993 |
All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes
- Computer Science Applications
- Linguistics and Language
- Language and Linguistics