We present a new compositional tense-aspect deindexing mechanism that makes use of tense trees as components of discourse contexts. The mechanism allows reference episodes to be correctly identified even for embedded clauses and for discourse that involves shifts in temporal perspective, and permits deindexed logical forms to be automatically computed with a small number of deindexing rules. 1 ...

The first goal of this paper is to determine whether superficially ‘tenseless’ sentences like (1b) contain a covert tense morpheme; I will argue that they do. The second goal is to determine what the semantics of that tense morpheme is. I will propose that (1b) contains a phonologically null tense morpheme which is lexically underspecified with respect to whether the reference time precedes or ...

In a majority of languages, the time of an event is expressed by marking tense on the verb. There is substantial evidence that the production of verb tense in sentences is more severely impaired than other functional categories in persons with agrammatic aphasia. The underlying source of this verb tense impairment is less clear, particularly in terms of the relative contribution of conceptual-s...

In this paper, I describe one annotation of tense transfer in parallel English and Portuguese texts. Even though the primary aim of the study is to compare the tense and aspect systems of the two languages, it also raises some questions as far as bilingual alignment in general is concerned. First, I present a detailed list of clausal mismatches, which shows that intra-sentential alignment is no...

2 Abstract In this article I defend the view that many central aspects of the semantics of tense are determined by independently-motivated principles of syntactic theory. I begin by decomposing tenses syntactically into a temporal ordering predicate (the true tense, on this approach) and two time-denoting arguments corresponding to covert a reference time (RT) argument and an eventuality time (...

On the task of determining the tense to use when translating a Chinese verb into English, current systems do not perform as well as human translators. The main focus of the present paper is to identify features that human translators use, but which are not currently automatically extractable. The goal is twofold: to test a particular hypothesis about what additional information human translator...

Arthur N. Prior, in the Preface of Past, Present and Future, made clear his indebtedness to “the very lively tense-logicians of California for many discussions”. Strangely, with a notable exception of Copeland (1996), there is no extensive discussion of these scholars (as a group, if not a school) in the literature on the history of tense logic. In this paper, I propose to study how Nino B. Coc...