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 languag...

ON THE SYSTEMATIC ASPECT OF IDIOMS Martha McGinnis University of Calgary It has traditionally been assumed that the meaning of some or all phrasal idioms is noncompositional. However, I will argue here that the aspectual meaning of idioms is completely systematic: there are no special aspectual restrictions on idioms, and moreover, the aspect of an idiom is compositional, combining the aspectua...

In this paper a new approach to the determination of aspectual class on a sentential level is proposed. It turns out that the composition of a new aspectual class can be understood as an embedding of the class introduced by the verb into a new more complex situation. The VP to bake apple pies, for instance, can therefore be presented as an iteration of several baking an apple pie-events which, ...

This paper presents a method for large corpus analysis to semantically classify an entire clause. In particular, we use cooccurrence statistics among similar clauses to determine the aspectual class of an input clause. The process examines linguistic features of clauses that are relevant to aspectual classiication. A genetic algorithm determines what combinations of linguistic features to use f...

This paper presents a method for large corpus analysis to semantically classify an entire clause. In particular, we use cooccurrence statistics among similar clauses to determine the aspectual class of an input clause. The process examines linguistic features of clauses that are relevant to aspectual classiication. A genetic algorithm determines what combinations of linguistic features to use f...

2007 was the first international congress on the “square of oppositions”. A first attempt to structure debate using n-opposition theory was presented along with the results of a first experiment on the web. Our proposal for this paper is to define relations between arguments through a structure of opposition (square of oppositions is one structure of opposition). We will be trying to answer the...