The Proper Treatment Of Events

The Proper Treatment of Events offers a novel approach to the semantics of tense and aspect motivated by cognitive considerations. The book begins by presenting data about the human conceptualization of time, proposing that planning is important in this regard, and hence equally for the linguistic encoding of time as tense and aspect. It then introduces a formal theory of planning, a combination of an event calculus as developed in Artificial Intelligence with a truth theory and logic programming techniques. The combined system is then applied to detailed analyses of tense, grammatical and lexical aspect, coercion, and different types of nominalizations.

Michiel van Lambalgen is Professor of Logic and Cognitive Science at the University of Amsterdam.

Fritz Hamm is Assistant Professor of General Linguistics at the University of Tübingen.

Figures

ix

Preface

xi

Part I Time, Events, and Cognition

1

(32)

1 Time

3

(12)

1 Psychology of Time

4

(6)

2 Why Do We Have the Experience of Time at All?

10

(5)

2 Events and Time

15

(12)

1 The Analogy Between Events and Objects

15

(2)

2 The Russell-Kamp Construction of Time from Events

17

(3)

3 Walker's Construction

20

(1)

4 Richer Languages for Events

21

(2)

5 Some Linguistic Applications

23

(2)

6 Continuous Time from Events

25

(1)

7 Conclusion

26

(1)

3 Language, Time, and Planning

27

(6)

Part II The Formal Apparatus

33

(46)

4 Events Formalized

35

(14)

1 A Calculus of Events

36

(3)

2 The Axiom System EC

39

(4)

3 Scenarios

43

(4)

4 Minimal Models

47

(2)

5 Computing with Time and Events

49

(22)

1 Logic Programming with Constraints

52

(4)

2 Minimal Models Revisited

56

(5)

3 How to Get to the Other Side of a Street

61

(2)

4 When Do Causes Take Effect?

63

(1)

5 Da Capo, with Feeling

64

(3)

Exercises for Chapters 4 and 5

67

(4)

6 Finishing Touches

71

(8)

1 Coding VPs as Fluents and Events

71

(2)

2 Consistency, Truth, and Partiality

73

(6)

Part III A Marriage Made in Heaven - Linguistics and Robotics

79

(150)

7 Aktionsart

83

(14)

1 Eventualities

84

(1)

2 Formal Definition of Aktionsarten

85

(8)

3 Perfective and Imperfective Eventualities

93

(4)

8 Tense

97

(34)

1 Reichenbach's Reference Time R

98

(6)

2 Event Time and the Sentence

104

(1)

3 Present Tense

105

(4)

4 Past Tense

109

(5)

5 Future Tense

114

(15)

Exercises

129

(2)

9 Tense in French: Passé Simple and Imparfait

131

(20)

1 Introduction

131

(1)

2 Data

132

(6)

3 Formalizing the Passé Simple and Imparfait

138

(11)

4 Coda

149

(1)

Exercises

150

(1)

10 Grammatical Aspect

151

(18)

1 The Perfect

151

(5)

2 The Progressive

156

(4)

3 A Computational Proof

160

(1)

4 Comments on the Literature

160

(8)

Exercises

168

(1)

11 Coercion

169

(16)

1 Additive Coercion

171

(1)

2 Subtractive Coercion

172

(1)

3 Cross-Coercion

173

(4)

4 Temporal Adverbials: 'in' and 'for'

177

(4)

5 Coercion and Intensionality

181

(2)

Exercises

183

(2)

12 Nominalization

185

(44)

1 Two Types of English Gerunds

185

(11)

2 History of the English Gerundive System

196

(9)

3 Nominalizations Formalized I: Denotation Types

205

(16)

4 Nominalizations Formalized II: Lexical Meaning

221

(3)

Exercises

224

(5)

Appendix: The Basics of Logic Programming

229

(10)

1 Logic Programming for Propositional Logic

230

(6)

2 Logic Programming for Predicate Logic

236

(3)

References

239

(6)

Index

245

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The Proper Treatment Of Events

Summary

Author Biography

Table of Contents

Supplemental Materials