The interpretation of tense in discourse

Published 1 January 1987Open access

Bonnie Webber

Citations45

TL;DR

This paper gives an account of the role tense plays in the listener's reconstruction of the events and situations a speaker has chosen to describe and several new ideas are presented: that tense is better viewed by analogy with definite NPs than with pronouns.

Abstract

This paper gives an account of the role tense plays in the listener's reconstruction of the events and situations a speaker has chosen to describe. Several new ideas are presented: (a) that tense is better viewed by analogy with definite NPs than with pronouns; (b) that a narrative has a temporal focus that grounds the context-dependency of tense; and (c) that focus management heuristics can be used to track the movement of temporal focus.

Keywords

Computer ScienceArts and Humanities

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