Tense, Aspect, and The Interpretation Of Tenseless Elements In English

Citation

Dalrymple, M. (1988, June). The interpretation of tense and aspect in English. In 26th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (pp. 68-74).

Abstract

An analysis of English tense and aspect is presented that specifies temporal precedence relations with a sentence. The relevant reference points for interpretation are taken to be the initial and terminal points of events in the world, as well as two “hypothetical” times: the perfect time (when a sentence contains perfect aspect) and the progressive or during time. We also describe a method for providing temporal interpretation for nontensed elements such as nouns and adjectives, whose interpretation may be temporally dependent.

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