Elamur Research⌕
☰
home / papers / 1988 / Aspect, Aspectual class, and the Temporal Structure of Narrative

Aspect, Aspectual class, and the Temporal Structure of Narrative

Paper · 1988 · Alexander Nakhimovsky

Summary

Nakhimovsky asks what everyday knowledge about events is built into word meanings, and how readers use it to work out when narrated events happen relative to one another. The work is theoretical. It uses no corpus, treebank or evaluation. Instead, it argues from linguistic examples across languages, especially Russian and English, and models meanings as frames. Situations unfolding in time are called "histories," split into types (h-types) and tokens (h-tokens). Temporal knowledge falls into three kinds. Compositional knowledge divides an event into stages. Durational knowledge covers relative lengths and time scales, anchored to shared cyclical units. Aspectual knowledge separates grammatical aspect, the lexical aspectual class, and the sentence's aspectual perspective, which depends on where the Reference Time (RT) falls. The author proposes classifying events by the resources they use up and the goals they reach. For narratives, temporal and other discontinuities mark the borders of discourse segments, and all three knowledge kinds order events inside a segment. The paper matters because it links grammatical categories to commonsense knowledge representation and outlines a lexicon program usable for discourse processing.

Key points

  • Event stages. Events have five stages: preparatory, initial, body, final and resulting. The preparatory stage follows Moens and Steedman 1987. "Cross the road" is the worked example of how a when-clause can point to any stage.
  • Aspectual perspective. An RT inside the body gives an imperfective perspective. An RT after the final stage, or rarely before the initial one, gives a perfective perspective. English is described as only weakly typed for aspect compared with Russian.
  • Time scales. These are stated as ranges of time units, for example visit-1 [minutes, hours] versus visit-2 [days]. Two events are in a "much-greater-than" relation when their scales do not overlap.
  • Telic events. These affect their arguments in a small set of ways: create, destroy, move, modify and expend. Qualitative dependencies are modeled following Forbus 1985.
  • Proposed future work. A lexicon enriched this way could feed constraint propagation, as in Allen and Kautz 1985. Narrative studies would examine micromoves inside discourse segments and macromoves at their boundaries, aiming at segmentation heuristics.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓Colgate UniversityHamilton · United States3 works · 115 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 6The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Computer Science · 16,667 worksArtificial Intelligence · 16,194 worksArts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 worksPsychology · 1,552 worksExperimental and Cognitive Psychology · 870 works

Cite

Cite as Alexander Nakhimovsky. 1988. Aspect, Aspectual class, and the Temporal Structure of Narrative. Computational Linguistics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@article{nakhimovsky1988aspect,
  title = {{Aspect, Aspectual class, and the Temporal Structure of Narrative}},
  author = {Alexander Nakhimovsky},
  journal = {Computational Linguistics},
  year = {1988},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/J88-2004/}
}

References

62 references, 1 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

  1. Allen, James 1984 Towards a General Theory of Action and Time. Artificial Intelligence 23(2): 123-54. find
  2. Alien, James and Kautz, H.A. 1985 A Model of Naive Temporal Reasoning. In Hobbs and Moore 1985. find
  3. Apresjan, Juri 1974 Lexical Semantics. (In Russian) Nauka, Moscow. find
  4. Almeida, Michael J. 1987 Reasoning About the Temporal Structure of Narratives. Ph.D. diss. and TR 87-10. Computer Science Department, SUNY at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY. find
  5. Bach, Emmon 1986 The Algebra of Events. Linguistics and Philosophy 9: 5-16. find
  6. Bobrow, Daniel, (ed.) 1985 Qualitative Reasoning about Physical Systems. M1T Press, Cambridge, MA. find
  7. Bruce, Bertram 1981 A social interaction model of reading. Discourse Processes 4:273-311. find
  8. Bruder, G.A. et al. 1986 Deictic Centers in Narrative: An Interdisciplinary Cognitive-science Project. TR 86-20. Computer Science Department, SUNY at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY. find
  9. Bunt, H. 1985 The Formal Representation of (quasi) Continuous Concepts. In Hobbs and Moore 1985. find
  10. Campbell, Jeremy 1986 Winston Churchill's Afternoon Nap. Simon and Schuster, New York, NY. find
  11. Comrie, B. 1976 Aspect. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England. find
  12. Cooper, Robin 1986 Tense and Discourse Location in Situation Semantics. In Dowty 1986a: 17-36. find
  13. Creary, L.; and Pollard, Carl 1985 A Computational Semantics for Natural Language. Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Chicago, IL; 172-9. find
  14. Dahl, O. 1985 Tense and Aspect Systems. Basil Blackwell, Oxford, England. find
  15. Dowty, David 1986 The Effects of Aspectual Class on the Temporal Structure of Discourse. In Dowty 1986a: 37-61. find
  16. Dowty, David, (ed.) 1986a Tense and Aspect in Discourse. Linguistics and Philosophy 9(1) (special issue). find
  17. Dowty, David 1987 Aspect and NP semantics. Logic and Linguistics Conference. Stanford, CA. find
  18. Dowty, David 1977 Toward a Semantic Analysis of Verb Aspect and the English "imperfective" Progressive. Linguistics and Philosophy 1: 45-77. find
  19. Forbus, K.D. 1985 Qualitative Process Theory. In Bobrow 1985. find
  20. Fraisse, Paul 1984 Psychology of Time Perception. Annual Review of Psychology 1-34. find
  21. Genette, G. 1980 Narrative Discourse. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY. find
  22. Grosz, Barbara; and Sidner, Candace 1986 Attention, Intentions, and the Structure of Discourse. Computational Linguistics 12(3): 175-204.
  23. Hayes, P. 1985 The Second Naive Physics Manifesto. In Hobbs and Moore 1985. find
  24. Hayes, P. 1985a Naive Physics I; Ontology for Liquids. In Hobbs and Moore 1985. find
  25. Heim, Irene 1982 The Semantics of Definite and Indefinite Noun Phrases. PhD diss. University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA. find
  26. Hinrichs, Erhard 1986 Temporal Anaphora in Discourses of English. In Dowty 1986a: 63-82. find
  27. Hirst, G. 1987 Semantic Interpretation and the Resolution of Ambiguity. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England. find
  28. Hobbs, J.R. 1982 Towards an Understanding of Coherence in Discourse. In Lehnert and Ringle (eds.). Natural Language Processing. Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, NJ. find
  29. Hobbs, J.R. 1985a Granularity IJCAI 85: 432-5. find
  30. Hobbs, J.R. and R. C. Moore (eds.) 1985 Formal Theories of the Commonsense World. find
  31. Ablex Publishing Corporation, Norwood, NJ Hobbs, J.R. et al. 1985 Commonsense Summer: Final Report (no. CSL1-85-35) CSLI, Stanford, CA. find
  32. Hobbs, J.R. et al. 1986 Commonsense Metaphysics and Lexical Semantics. Proceedings of the 25th Annual Conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Stanford, CA; 231–40. find
  33. Horn, Larry 1984 Toward a New Taxonomy for Pragmatic Inference. In D. Schiffrin (ed.) Meaning, Form and Use in Context: Linguistic Application. Georgetown University Press, Washington, DC. find
  34. Joyce, James 1969 [1914] "Clay." In Dubliners. Modern Library, New York, NY; 99-106. find
  35. Kamp, Hans 1981 A Theory of Truth and Semantic Representation. In J.A.G. Groenendijk, et al. (eds.), Formal Methods in the Study of Language. Amsterdam. find
  36. Kamp, Hans and Christian Roerer 1983 Tense in Texts. In R. Bauerle, C. Schwarze, Arnim von Stechow (eds.). Meaning, Use and Interpretation in Language. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin, Germany. find
  37. Lehnert, Wendy 1982 Plot Units: A Narrative Summarization Strategy. In W. Lehnert and M. Ringle (eds.). Strategies for Natural Language Processing. Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ. find
  38. Link, G. 1983 The Logical Analysis of Plurals and Mass Terms: A Lattice-theoretical Approach. In R. Bauerle et al. (ed.), Meaning, Use and the Interpretation of Language. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin and New York. find
  39. McDermott, Drew 1982 A Temporal Logic for Reasoning about Processes and Plans. Cognitive Science 6: 101-155. find
  40. Moens, M.; and Steedman, M. 1987 Temporal Ontology in Natural Language. In Proceedings of the 26th Annual Conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Buffalo, NY; 1-7. find
  41. Mourelatos, A.P.D. 1981 Events, Processes, and States. In Tedeschi and Zaenen. find
  42. Nakhimovsky, A. 1983 Meaning-Text Linguistics and the Problem of Voice. Linguistic Research Inc., Edmonton, Alberta. find
  43. Nakhimovsky, A. 1986 The Lexicon and Commonsense Reasoning: A Case Study. Proceedings of the Conference on Advances in Lexicology. University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario. find
  44. Nakhimovsky, A. 1987a The Lexicon, Grammatical Categories, and Temporal Reasoning. In J. Hallam and C. Mellish (eds.), Advances in Artificial Intelligence, John Wiley, Chichester, England. find
  45. Nakhimovsky, A. 1987b Temporal Reasoning in Natural-Language Understanding: The Temporal Structure of the Narrative. EACL-87. Copenhagen. find
  46. Nakhimovsky, A. and Rapaport, W. In preparation. Discontinuities in narratives. find
  47. Nirenburg, Sergei; Raskin, Victor; and Tucker, Allen 1985 Interlingua Design for TRANSLATOR. Proceedings of the Colgate Conference on Machine Translation. Hamilton, NY. find
  48. Passonneau, Rebecca. 1987 Situations and Intervals. In Proceedings of the 26th Annual Conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Buffalo, NY; 8–15. find
  49. Rapaport, William J. 1986 Logical Foundations for Belief Representation. Cognitive Science 4: 371-422. find
  50. Reichman, R. 1985 Getting Computers to Talk Like You and Me. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. find
  51. Schank, R. (ed.) 1975 Conceptual Information Processing. North-Holland, Amsterdam. find
  52. Sidner, Candace 1983 Focusing in the Comprehension of Definite Anaphora. In M. Brady and R. Berwick (eds.), Computational Models of Discourse. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. find
  53. Talmy, Leonard 1983 How Language Structures Space. Berkeley Cognitive Science, Report no. 4, Berkeley, CA. find
  54. Tedeschi, P.; and Zaenen, Anne (eds.) 1981 Tense and Aspect (Syntax and Semantics 14), Academic Press, New York, NY. ter Meulen, Alice 1987 Structured Domains for Events. Workshop on Generics and Mass Terms. Stanford, CA. find
  55. Tompkins, Jane 1981 Reader Response Criticism. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD. find
  56. Vendler, Z. 1967 Verbs and Times. In Linguistics and Philosophy. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY. find
  57. Verkuyl, Henk 1972 On the Compositional Nature of Aspect. Reidel, Dordrecht. find
  58. Webber, Bonnie 1979 A Formal Approach to Discourse Anaphora. Garland, New York, NY. find
  59. Webber, Bonnie 1987a Two Steps Closer to Event Reference. TR MS-CIS-86-74, Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA. find
  60. Webber, Bonnie 1987b The Interpretation of Tense in Discourse. In Proceedings of the 26th Annual Conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Buffalo, NY; 147-154. find
  61. Wierzbicka, Anna 1985 Lexicography and Conceptual Analysis'. Ka-roma, Ann Arbor, MI. find
  62. Worline, Bonnie Bess 1956 The Children Who Stayed Alone. Scholastic Book Services, New York, NY. find

Updated

↑ back to top

This page in Markdown → https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/nakhimovsky-1988-aspect-aspectual-class-temporal-structure/