Serious computing with tense

In this paper we present a novel approach to the formal semantics of the French tense system. More precisely, we give a synopsis of the computational theory of meaning developed in [13], [12] and the forthcoming book [14], and apply it to two French tenses, Passé Simple and Imparfait. Much work has been done on French tenses within the framework of DRT or extensions thereof such as SDRT. The latter uses so-called rhetorical relations such as elaboration, to explain the peculiar ways in which events described by sentences in Passé Simple form can be ordered in time. It is claimed here that a much more insightful description can be obtained by taking a computational point of view, in which the meaning of an expression corresponds to an algorithm which computes its denotation in a given context. ‘Algorithm’ is taken very seriously here – it is the precise form of the algorithm (constraint logic programming) that is important. A cognitive justification for this particular choice is provided in [14]; here we can only hope to convince the reader by examples of the algorithm in action.