Four Types of Temporal Signals

Temporal prepositions in English signal various temporal relations over events and times. In this paper, we propose to categorize such signals into four types: locative, measure, boundary, and orientation signals. We show that each of these signal types is constrained by its own semantic restrictions. First, each of them takes as its argument a temporal entity structure either of an atomic type such as dates, periods of time, and time lengths or amounts, or of a complex type such as bounded intervals (“from dawn till dusk”) and oriented intervals with their lengths specified (“an hour after the sunset”). Second, each signal type determines the semantic type, called aspect, of an eventuality that it is associated with. Such an analysis of temporal signals, as we claim, lays a basis of developing an integrated spatio-temporal annotation scheme for language, especially involving motions.