Tense and Aspect: A Mereological Approach

Abstract

The purpose of this work is to provide a framework to address tense and aspect (Aktionsarten) phenomena in an unified way, mainly focusing on semantic representation. To achieve this goal we propose that: a) verbal morphology plays a crucial role in specifying the temporal meaning of a sentence and b) that morphosyntactic rules hold cross linguistically. For the purposes of semantic representation, we model the domain of events within an non-extensional mereological framework. This allows for a proper representation of perfective and imperfective events and of habituals, by means of plural quantifiers ranging on collections of events. With respect to tenses, we consider the present and the present perfect in Germanic and Romance, showing how different behaviours can be reduced to morphosyntactic differences. The relevance of this work for NLP lies in the conciseness of the semantic representations and in the compactness and generality of the linguistic knowledge bases (grammars, lexicons, semantic rules) allowed by the framework discussed.