Temporal reference : empirical and theoretical perspectives

This thesis investigates the expression of temporal reference – the location of eventualities (states and events) in time – in natural languages by looking at four languages: English, French, Italian and Romanian. It is suggested that temporal reference is determined at the discursive level through a large variety of linguistic and pragmatic means. Among the linguistic means there are the grammatical categories of Tense and Aspect (generally referred to through the generic notion verbal tense), inherent temporal features of the verb phrase known as lexical aspect, also called Aktionsart, temporal adverbials such as 'yesterday', 'last year' and 'in 1984', as well as pragmatic temporal connectives such as 'before', 'then' and 'at the same time'. The current state of the art on temporal reference lacks of a comprehensive cross-linguistically valid model that holds for typologically different languages, which goes beyond language specificities and which permits consistent contrastive analyses. The present study aims at filling in this gap by proposing a model of temporal reference situated in-between Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, Corpus Linguistics, Contrastive Analysis, Natural Language Processing and Machine Translation fields. The research presented in this thesis is framed by two multidisciplinary projects aiming at improving the results of statistical machine translation systems in terms of textual coherence by providing them semantic and pragmatic information. The interest in temporal reference in this interdisciplinary perspective originates in the apparently simple empirical question: how can one improve the translation of verbal tenses by automatic translation systems? In order to answer this empirical question, other related issues were addressed, such as which verbal tenses are problematic, what is the meaning of a verbal tense, how do humans process this temporal information in order to understand and translate it and does the translation of a tense depend on other temporal devices in the discourse? This research examines these questions, on the one hand, through revisiting the most relevant existent syntactic, semantic and pragmatic theories, as well as neurolinguistic and computational investigations of the principal ingredients of temporal reference in discourse, i.e. Tense, Aspect and Aktionsart, and on the other hand, through a rich and solid empirical research on multilingual translation corpora and experimental data. From a theoretical perspective, the research is carried out in the relevance theoretic framework (Sperber & Wilson 1986; Wilson & Sperber 2012) according to which the linguistic expressions that a speaker utters, hence temporal reference and its principal ingredients as well, …