Representing Time in Natural Language

Book excerpt: The topic of temporal meaning in texts has received considerable attention in recent years from scholars in linguistics, logical semantics, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence. Representing Time in Natural Language offers a systematic and detailed account of how we use temporal information contained in a text or in discourse to reason about the flow of time, inferring the order in which events happened when this is not explicitly stated. A new representational system is designed to formalize an appropriately context-dependent notion of situated inference. The Dynamic Aspect Tree, representing temporal dependencies, constitutes a novel and important dynamic temporal logic, one that makes it easy to see "what follows when" from the information given in an ordinary English text.