Abstract

This paper proposes a set of representations for tenses and a set of constraints on how they can be combined in adjunct clauses. The semantics we propose explains the possible meanings of tenses in a variety of sentential contexts. It also supports an elegant constraint on tense combination in adjunct clauses. These semantic representations provide insights into the interpretations of tenses, and the constraints provide a source of syntactic disambiguation that has not previously been demonstrated. We demonstrate an implemented disambiguator for a certain class of three-clause sentences based on our theory.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)119-126
Number of pages8
JournalProceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Volume1990-June
StatePublished - 1990
Event28th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 1990 - Pittsburgh, United States
Duration: Jun 6 1990Jun 9 1990

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