When am I? A Tense Time for Some Tense Theorists?

Lecture 2 : Time , tense , and tense - logic ∗

Time and Tense

Humans conceive of time in terms of space, as shown by the language that we use to talk about temporal relations: we habitually speak of stretching out or compressing an activity, heading toward the future, returning to the past and so on (Whorf 1956, Lakoff and Johnson 1980, Binnick 1991:Chapter 1). When describing the meanings of the tenses, linguists have relied on a specific instance of the...

Annotating "tense" in a Tense-less Language

In the context of Natural Language Processing, annotation is about recovering implicit information that is useful for natural language applications. In this paper we describe a “tense” annotation task for Chinese, a language that does not have grammatical tense, that is designed to infer the temporal location of a situation in relation to the temporal deixis, the moment of speech. If successful...

A Tense Time for the Nuclear Envelope

When many cells divide, the nuclear envelope poses a problem: the spindle microtubules can't access the chromosomes. Two recent papers in Cell describe how the spindle solves this problem by literally pulling open the nucleus at the beginning of mitosis.

Time with and without tense

How is temporal information conveyed in language? In languages with tense it is direct; without tense, inference allows the receiver to arrive at an indirect temporal interpretation. I will discuss tensed and tenseless languages, proposing a unified approach that applies to both. I show that a few very general pragmatic principles account for temporal interpretation, direct and indirect. I assu...