Tenses as Anaphora

TENSES AS ANAPHORA* Kurt Eberle Walter Kasper Institut ftir Maschinelle Sprachverarbeitung Universit£t Stuttgart Keplerstr. 17 West Germany Net address: nbaa1423@ds0rus54.bitnet Abstract A proposal to deal with French tenses in the frame- work of Discourse Representation Theory is pre- sented, as it has been implemented for a fragment at the IMS. It is based on the theory of tenses of H. Kamp and Ch. Rohrer. Instead of using operators to express the meaning of the tenses the Reichenbachian point of view is adopted and refined such that the impact of the tenses with respect to the meaning of the text is understood as contribution to the integration of the events of a sentence in the event structure of the preceeding text. Thereby a system of relevant times provided by the preceeding text and by the temporal adverbials of the sentence being processed is used. This system consists of one or more ref- erence times and ~emporal perspective ~imes, the speech time and the location time. The special in- terest of our proposal is to establish a plausible choice of "anchors" for the new event out of the system of relevant times and to update this system of temporal coordinates correctly. The problem of choice is largely neglected in the literature. In op- position to the approach of Kamp and Rohrer the exact meaning of the tenses is fixed by the resolu- tion component and not in the process of syntactic analysis. 1 Introduction On a Reichenbachian analysis tenses are inter- preted as relating three kinds of temporal en- tities: the time Of the event talked about, the speech time (time of utterance) and the refer- *The research was done in the context of ACORD (ES- PRIT P393) and LILOG, and was also supported by the German Science Foundation (Ro245/13-3) ence time. In the original version these entities are understood as time-points. In the sequel fre- quently this system was transformed into interval- based approaches to describe the interaction of adverbials, tenses and aspect on sentence level (cf. v.Eynde(1987), Bras/Sorillo(1988)) or to de- scribe the course of events on text level (cf. Hin- richs(1986), Partee(1984)l). A detailed criticism of the Reichenbachian analysis of tenses can be found in B~uerle(1979)). Motivated by text-phenomena the Kamp/Rohrer approach (1983,1985) splits the Reichenbachian reference time into three contextu- ally given parameters by adding temporal perspec- tive points and location times. Our approach which is based on the Kamp/Rohrer analysis differs from treatments of the semantics of tenses (and aspects) which charac- terize the tenses by some simple operator (usually interpreted as a temporal quantifier) in that respect that the tenses are described in terms of their con- tribution to the problem of how the temporal struc- ture of the events talked about can be constructed. The problem how to determine the times the con- text has to supply and to which the events have to be related is largely neglected in theoretical dis- cussions of the semantics of tenses. It is the main topic of our …

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