Focusing on English and German examples, the study deals with the temporal interpretation of texts in non-aspect languages. With regard to linguistic form, grammar provides three primary sources of temporal information: the lexical semantics of verb-argument structures and adverb-like modifiers, the compositional rules that control how the temporal and aspectual information of constituents merges into complex semantic units, and the system of tense and aspect. This work demonstrates how both the linguistic and the non-linguistic knowledge interact in the reconstruction of temporal coherence. This innovative study presents a unified account of the semantics of temporality which treats the varying grammatical factors (aspectual classes, tense, and discourse structure) in a systematic way.

MARTIN TRAUTWEIN is a researcher at the Institute for Formal Ontology and Medical Information Science at the University of Leipzig, Germany.

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