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Events, instants and temporal reference

In Rainer Bäuerle, Urs Egli & Arnim von Stechow (eds.), Semantics from different points of view. New York: Springer Verlag. pp. 376--418 (1979)

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  1. Topological Foundations of Cognitive Science.Carola Eschenbach, Christopher Habel & Barry Smith (eds.) - 1984 - Hamburg: Graduiertenkolleg Kognitionswissenschaft.
    A collection of papers presented at the First International Summer Institute in Cognitive Science, University at Buffalo, July 1994, including the following papers: ** Topological Foundations of Cognitive Science, Barry Smith ** The Bounds of Axiomatisation, Graham White ** Rethinking Boundaries, Wojciech Zelaniec ** Sheaf Mereology and Space Cognition, Jean Petitot ** A Mereotopological Definition of 'Point', Carola Eschenbach ** Discreteness, Finiteness, and the Structure of Topological Spaces, Christopher Habel ** Mass Reference and the Geometry of Solids, Almerindo E. Ojeda (...)
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  • Can Semantics Guide Ontology?Katherine Ritchie - 2016 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 94 (1):24-41.
    Since the linguistic turn, many have taken semantics to guide ontology. Here, I argue that semantics can, at best, serve as a partial guide to ontological commitment. If semantics were to be our guide, semantic data and semantic treatments would need to be taken seriously. Through an examination of plurals and their treatments, I argue that there can be multiple, equally semantically adequate, treatments of a natural language theory. Further, such treatments can attribute different ontological commitments to a theory. Given (...)
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  • Quantification as reference: Kalaallisut Q-verbs.Maria Bittner & Naja Trondhjem - 2008 - In Lisa Matthewson (ed.), Quantification: A Cross-Linguistic Perspective. Emerald. pp. 7-66.
    Formal semantics has so far focused on three categories of quantifiers, to wit, Q-determiners (e.g. 'every'), Q-adverbs (e.g. 'always'), and Q-auxiliaries (e.g. 'would'). All three can be analyzed in terms of tripartite logical forms (LF). This paper presents evidence from verbs with distributive affixes (Q-verbs) in Kalaallisut, Polish, and Bininj Gun-wok, which cannot be analyzed in terms of tripartite LFs. It is argued that a Q-verb involves discourse reference to a distributive verbal dependency, i.e. an episode-valued function that sends different (...)
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  • A Road Map of Interval Temporal Logics and Duration Calculi.Valentin Goranko, Angelo Montanari & Guido Sciavicco - 2004 - Journal of Applied Non-Classical Logics 14 (1-2):9-54.
    We survey main developments, results, and open problems on interval temporal logics and duration calculi. We present various formal systems studied in the literature and discuss their distinctive features, emphasizing on expressiveness, axiomatic systems, and (un)decidability results.
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  • Propositional interval neighborhood logics: Expressiveness, decidability, and undecidable extensions.Davide Bresolin, Valentin Goranko, Angelo Montanari & Guido Sciavicco - 2010 - Annals of Pure and Applied Logic 161 (3):289-304.
    In this paper, we investigate the expressiveness of the variety of propositional interval neighborhood logics , we establish their decidability on linearly ordered domains and some important subclasses, and we prove the undecidability of a number of extensions of PNL with additional modalities over interval relations. All together, we show that PNL form a quite expressive and nearly maximal decidable fragment of Halpern–Shoham’s interval logic HS.
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  • Tense as temporal centering.Maria Bittner - manuscript
    Abstract According to an influential theory, English tenses are anaphoric to an aforementioned reference point. This point is sometimes construed as a time (e.g. Reichenbach 1947, Partee 1973, Stone 1997) and sometimes as an event (e.g. Kamp 1979, 1981, Webber 1988). Moreover, some researchers draw semantic parallels between tenses and pronouns (e.g. Partee 1973, 1984, Stone 1997), whereas others draw parallels between tenses and anaphorically anchored (in)definite descriptions (e.g. Webber 1988). This paper proposes a unified approach.
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  • Time and modality without tenses or modals.Maria Bittner - 2011 - In Renate Musan & Monika Rathert (eds.), Tense across Languages. Niemeyer. pp. 147--188.
    In English, discourse reference to time involves grammatical tenses interpreted as temporal anaphors. Recently, it has been argued that conditionals involve modal discourse anaphora expressed by a parallel grammatical system of anaphoric modals. Based on evidence from Kalaallisut, this paper argues that temporal and modal anaphora can be just as precise in a language that does not have either grammatical category. Instead, temporal anaphora directly targets eventualities of verbs, without mediating tenses, while modal anaphora involves anaphoric moods and/or attitudinal verbs.
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  • Conditionals as attitude reports.Maria Bittner - manuscript
    Most theories of conditionals and attitudes do not analyze either phenomenon in terms of the other. A few view attitude reports as a species of conditionals (e.g. Stalnaker 1984, Heim 1992). Based on evidence from Kalaallisut, this paper argues for the opposite thesis: conditionals are a species of attitude reports. The argument builds on prior findings that conditionals are modal topic-comment structures (e.g. Haiman 1978, Bittner 2001), and that in mood-based Kalaallisut English future (e.g. Ole will win) translates into a (...)
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  • Tense, mood, and centering.Maria Bittner - manuscript
    Natural languages exhibit a great variety of grammatical paradigms. For instance, in English verbs are grammatically marked for tense, whereas in the tenseless Eskimo-Aleut language Kalaallisut they are marked for illocutionary mood. Although time is a universal dimension of the human experience and speaking is part of that experience, some languages encode reference to time without any grammatical tense morphology, or reference to speech acts without any illocutionary mood morphology. Nevertheless, different grammatical systems are semantically parallel in certain respects. Specifically, (...)
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  • Le strutture dell'ordinario.Achille C. Varzi - 1999 - In Luigi Lombardi Vallauri (ed.), Logos dell’essere, logos della norma. Bari: Editrice Adriatica. pp. 489–530.
    The general hypothesis underlying this work is that mereology (the study of the relations between an entity and its parts) and topology (understood as the study of the qualitative relations of connection and compactness) may jointly constitute adequate grounds for the formal-ontological analysis of the world of ordinary experience. The analysis focuses on certain minimal (structural) principles on the basis of which different philosophical theories may be erected.
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  • Confini. Dove finisce una cosa e inizia un’altra.Achille C. Varzi - 2007 - In Andrea Bottani & Richard Davies (eds.), Ontologie regionali. Mimesis. pp. 209–222.
    Ci imbattiamo in un confine ogni volta che pensiamo a un’entità demarcata rispetto a ciò che la circonda. C’è un confine (una superficie) che delimita l’interno di una sfera dal suo esterno; c’è un confine (una frontiera) che separa il Maryland dalla Pennsylvania. Talvolta la collocazione esatta di un confine non è chiara o è in qualche modo controversa (come quando si cerchi di tracciare i limiti del monte Everest, o il confine del nostro corpo). Talaltra il confine non corrisponde (...)
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  • Boundary.Achille C. Varzi - 2013 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    We think of a boundary whenever we think of an entity demarcated from its surroundings. There is a boundary (a line) separating Maryland and Pennsylvania. There is a boundary (a circle) isolating the interior of a disc from its exterior. There is a boundary (a surface) enclosing the bulk of this apple. Sometimes the exact location of a boundary is unclear or otherwise controversial (as when you try to trace out the margins of Mount Everest, or even the boundary of (...)
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  • Parts, Wholes, and Part-Whole Relations: The Prospects of Mereotopology.Achille C. Varzi - 1996 - Data and Knowledge Engineering 20:259–286.
    We can see mereology as a theory of parthood and topology as a theory of wholeness. How can these be combined to obtain a unified theory of parts and wholes? This paper examines various non-equivalent ways of pursuing this task, with specific reference to its relevance to spatio-temporal reasoning. In particular, three main strategies are compared: (i) mereology and topology as two independent (though mutually related) chapters; (ii) mereology as a general theory subsuming topology; (iii) topology as a general theory (...)
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  • Boundaries, continuity, and contact.Achille C. Varzi - 1997 - Noûs 31 (1):26-58.
    There are conflicting intuitions concerning the status of a boundary separating two adjacent entities (or two parts of the same entity). The boundary cannot belong to both things, for adjacency excludes overlap; and it cannot belong to neither, for nothing lies between two adjacent things. Yet how can the dilemma be avoided without assigning the boundary to one thing or the other at random? Some philosophers regard this as a reductio of the very notion of a boundary, which should accordingly (...)
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  • Aspectual universals of temporal anaphora.Maria Bittner - 2008 - In Susan Deborah Rothstein (ed.), Theoretical and Crosslinguistic Approaches to the Semantics of Aspect. John Benjamins. pp. 11--349.
    It has long been recognized that temporal anaphora in French and English depends on the aspectual distinction between events and states. For example, temporal location as well as temporal update depends on the aspectual type. This paper presents a general theory of aspect-based temporal anaphora, which extends from languages with grammatical tenses (like French and English) to tenseless languages (e.g. Kalaallisut). This theory also extends to additional aspect-dependent phenomena and to non-atomic aspectual types, processes and habits, which license anaphora to (...)
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  • Concealed causatives.Maria Bittner - 1999 - Natural Language Semantics 7 (1):1-78.
    Crosslinguistically, causative constructions conform to the following generalization: If the causal relation is syntactically concealed, then it is semantically direct. Concealed causatives span a wide syntactic spectrum, ranging from resultative complements in English to causative subjects in Miskitu. A unified type-driven theory is proposed which attributes the understood causal relation—and other elements of constructional meaning—to type lifting operations predictably licensed by type mismatch at LF. The proposal has far-reaching theoretical implications not only for the theory of compositionality and causation, but (...)
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  • Philosophy and Cognitive Sciences: Proceedings of the 16th International Wittgenstein Symposium (Kirchberg Am Wechsel, Austria 1993).Roberto Casati & Barry Smith (eds.) - 1994 - Vienna: Wien: Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky.
    Online collection of papers by Devitt, Dretske, Guarino, Hochberg, Jackson, Petitot, Searle, Tye, Varzi and other leading thinkers on philosophy and the foundations of cognitive Science. Topics dealt with include: Wittgenstein and Cognitive Science, Content and Object, Logic and Foundations, Language and Linguistics, and Ontology and Mereology.
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  • Discourse transparency and the meaning of temporal locating adverbs.Daniel Altshuler - 2014 - Natural Language Semantics 22 (1):55-88.
    This paper proposes that a core semantic property of temporal locating adverbs is the ability to introduce a new time discourse referent. The core data comes from that same day in narrative discourse. I argue that unlike other previously studied temporal locating adverbs—which introduce a new time discourse referent and relate it to the speech time or a salient time introduced into the discourse context—that same day is ‘twice anaphoric’, i.e. it retrieves two salient times from the input context without (...)
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  • Constructing Situations and Time.Tim Fernando - 2011 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 40 (3):371 - 396.
    Situations serving as partial worlds as well as events in natural language semantics are constructed from a type-theoretic interpretation of firstorder formulae and (after a type reduction) temporal formulae. Limitations of the Russell-Wiener-Kamp derivation of time from events are discussed and overcome to give a more widely applicable account of temporal granularity. Finite situations are formulated as strings of observations, conceptualized to persist inertially (in the absence of forces).
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  • Refining Temporal Reference in Event Structures.Fabio Pianesi & Achille C. Varzi - 1996 - Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 37 (1):71-83.
    This paper expands on the theory of event structures put forward in previous work by further investigating the subtle connections between time and events. Specifically, in the first part we generalize the notion of an event structure to that of a refinement structure, where various degrees of temporal granularity are accommodated. In the second part we investigate how these structures can account for the context-dependence of temporal structures in natural language semantics.
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  • Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 9.Emar Maier, Corien Bary & Janneke Huitink (eds.) - 2005 - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics.
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  • Aspectual classes and aspectual composition.H. J. Verkuyl - 1989 - Linguistics and Philosophy 12 (1):39 - 94.
    This paper is a critical examination of Vendler's well-known aspectual classes (states, activities, accomplishments, achievements). It is argued that it not classes that play a role in the explanation of aspectual phenomena but rather some specific semantic factors from which aspectual classes can be constructed, in particular factors inherent to the (lexical) verb and to the determiners of noun phrases.
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  • Reference to Abstract Objects in Discourse.Nicholas Asher - 1993 - Dordrecht, Boston, and London: Kluwer.
    This volume is about abstract objects and the ways we refer to them in natural language. Asher develops a semantical and metaphysical analysis of these entities in two stages. The first reflects the rich ontology of abstract objects necessitated by the forms of language in which we think and speak. A second level of analysis maps the ontology of natural language metaphysics onto a sparser domain--a more systematic realm of abstract objects that are fully analyzed. This second level reflects the (...)
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  • Temporal propositions as vague predicates.Tim Fernando - unknown
    The idea that temporal propositions are vague predicates is examined with attention to the nature of the objects over which the predicates range. These objects should not, it is argued, be identified once and for all with points or intervals in the real line (or any fixed linear order). Context has an important role to play not only in sidestepping the Sorites paradox (Gaifman 2002) but also in shaping temporal moments/extent (Landman 1991). The Russell-Wiener construction of time from events (Kamp (...)
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  • The effects of aspectual class on the temporal structure of discourse: Semantics or pragmatics? [REVIEW]David Dowty - 1986 - Linguistics and Philosophy 9 (1):37 - 61.
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  • Towards the use of automated reasoning in discourse disambiguation.Claire Gardent & Bonnie Webber - 2001 - Journal of Logic, Language and Information 10 (4):487-509.
    In this paper, we claim that the disambiguation ofreferring expressions in discourse can be formulated in terms automatedreasoners can address. Specifically, we show that consistency,informativity and minimality are criteria which (i) can be implementedusing automated reasoning tools and (ii) can be used to disambiguatenoun-noun compounds, metonymy and definite descriptions.
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  • Distinguishing between events and times: Some evidence from the semantics of then. [REVIEW]SheilaR Glasbey - 1993 - Natural Language Semantics 1 (3):285-312.
    An investigation into the behavior of sentence-final then suggests the need to distinguish between two uses:As a temporal anaphor referring back to a previously established explicit temporal referent (ETR).As a way of expressing relations between states/events, where no ETR is required.A means of making this distinction in Discourse Representation Theory (DRT) (Kamp and Reyle (forthcoming)) is proposed. This involves restricting the introduction of temporal referents into the universe of discourse to cases where certain types of temporal adverbials are present. In (...)
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  • A force-theoretic framework for event structure.Bridget Copley & Heidi Harley - 2015 - Linguistics and Philosophy 38 (2):103-158.
    We propose an account of dynamic predicates which draws on the notion of force, eliminating reference to events in the linguistic semantics. We treat dynamic predicates as predicates of forces, represented as functions from an initial situation to a final situation that occurs ceteris paribus, that is, if nothing external intervenes. The possibility that opposing forces might intervene to prevent the transition to a given final situation leads us to a novel analysis of non-culminating accomplishment predicates in a variety of (...)
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  • Grammatical Morphemes and Conceptual Structure in Discourse Processing.Daniel G. Morrow - 1986 - Cognitive Science 10 (4):423-455.
    The present paper analyzes how the semantic and pragmatic functions of closed class categories, or grammatical morphemes (i.e., inflections and function words), organize discourse processing. Grammatical morphemes tend to express a small set of conceptual distinctions that organize a wide range of objects and relations, usually expressed by content or open class words (i.e., nouns and verbs), into situations anchored to a discourse context. Therefore, grammatical morphemes and content words cooperate in guiding the construction of a situation model during discourse (...)
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  • On similarity in counterfactuals.Ana Arregui - 2009 - Linguistics and Philosophy 32 (3):245-278.
    This paper investigates the interpretation of counterfactual conditionals. The main goal of the paper is to provide an account of the semantic role of similarity in the evaluation of counterfactuals. The paper proposes an analysis according to which counterfactuals are treated as predications “ de re ” over past situations in the actual world. The relevant situations enter semantic composition via the interpretation of tense. Counterfactuals are treated as law-like conditionals with de re predication over particular facts. Similarity with respect (...)
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  • A formal semantic analysis of the progressive.Alexandra Lascarides - 1988 - Dissertation, University of Edinburgh
    Formal semantics constitutes the framework of this thesis, and the aim is to characterise the semantics of the progressive, as it appears in sentence. Max was running towards the station Among the problems is one known as the "imperfective paradox". According to intuitions, sentence entails, but no entailment holds between and. Max was running towards the station Max ran towards the station Max was running to the station Max ran to the station Since and would seem to have the same (...)
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  • On the nature of time: a biopragmatic perspective on language, thought, and reality.Nils B. Thelin - 2014 - Uppsala: Uppsala Universitet.
    This book is a synthesis of more than three decades of research into the concept of time and its semiotic nature. If traditional philosophy – and philosophy of time should be no exception – in the shadow of advancing biology can be said to have reached an impasse, one important reason for this, in harmony with Wittgenstein’s vision, appears to have been its lack of appropriate tools for explicating language. The present theory of time proceeds, accordingly, from the exploration of (...)
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  • Nominal and temporal anaphora.Barbara H. Partee - 1984 - Linguistics and Philosophy 7 (3):243--286.
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  • In Defence of Axiomatic Semantics.Chris Fox & Raymond Turner - 2011 - In Piotr Stalmaszczyk (ed.), Philosophical and Formal Approaches to Linguistic Analysis. Ontos. pp. 145-160.
    We may wonder about the status of logical accounts of the meaning of language. When does a particular proposal count as a theory? How do we judge a theory to be correct? What criteria can we use to decide whether one theory is “better” than another? Implicitly, many accounts attribute a foundational status to set theory, and set-theoretic characterisations of possible worlds in particular. The goal of a semantic theory is then to find a translation of the phenomena of interest (...)
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  • Do we need interval semantics?Pavel Tichý - 1985 - Linguistics and Philosophy 8 (2):263 - 282.
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  • A speaker-based approach to aspect.Carlota Smith - 1986 - Linguistics and Philosophy 9 (1):97 - 115.
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  • Semantics and Discourse Representation.Richard Spencer-Smith - 1987 - Mind and Language 2 (1):1-26.
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  • Introduction to natural language semantics, henriëtte de Swart.Katharina Hartmann & Thomas Ede Zimmermann - 2001 - Journal of Logic, Language and Information 10 (4):511-518.
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