The Interpretation of Tense and Aspect in English

THE INTERPRETATION OF TENSE AND ASPECT IN ENGLISH Mary Dalrymple Artificial Intelligence Center SRI International 333 Ravenswood Avenue Menlo Park, California 94025 USA ABSTRACT An analysis of English tense and aspect is pre- sented that specifies temporal precedence relations within a sentence. The relevant reference points for interpretation are taken to be the initial and terminal points of events in the world, as well as two "hypothetical" times: the perfect time (when a sentence contains perfect aspect) and the pro- gressive or during time. A method for providing temporal interpretation for nontensed elements in the sentence is also described. 1. Introduction The analysis of tense and aspect requires spec- ifying what relations can or cannot hold among times and events, given a sentence describing those events. 1 For example, a specification of the mean- ing of the past-tense sentence "John ate a cake" involves the fact that the time of the main event - in this case, the cake-eating event - precedes the time of utterance of the sentence. Various pro- posals have also been made regarding the analysis of aspect which involve auxiliary times or events, whereby the proper relationship of these auxiliary times or events to "real" main events is specified. We provide an analysis of English tense and aspect that involves specifying relations among times rather than events. We also offer a means of interpreting tenseless elements like nouns and ad- jectives whose interpretation may be temporally dependent. For example, the noun phrase "the warm cakes" picks out different sets of cakes, de- pending on the time relative to which it'receives an interpretation. The analysis presented here has been imple- mented with the Prolog data base query system 1The work presented here was supported by SP, I In- ternational. I am grateful to Phil Cohen, Bill Croft, Doug Edwards, Jerry Hobbe, Doug Moran, and Fernando Perelm for helpful discussion and comments. CHAT (Pereira 1983), and the representations are based on those used in that system. We shall show that an analysis of tense and aspect involv- ing specification of relations among times rather than among events results in a clean analysis of various types of sentences. 2. Time Points Harper and Charniak (1986) [henceforth H&C] provide an interesting and revealing analysis of English tense and aspect involving relations be- tween events. There are several kinds of events: the u~terance event, which is associated with the time of the utterance; the main event, or the event being described by the main verb of the sentence; the perfecg event; and the progressivJe event. The representation of every sentence involves the ut- terance event and the main event; sentences with progressive or perfect aspect also involve progres- sive or perfect events. This treatment is quite different from the Re- ichenbach (1947) conception of "reference time", which is assumed to be relevant for all sentences. To translate between the two systems, the refer- ence time may be thought of as being represented by the perfect event in perfect sentences and by …

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