Temporal ontology and temporal reference

摘要: A semantics of temporal categories in language and a theory their use defining the relations between events both require more complex structure on domain underlying meaning representations than is commonly assumed. This paper proposes an ontology based such notions as causation consequence, rather purely primitives. central notion that elementary event-complex called "nucleus." nucleus can be thought association goal event, or "culmination," with "preparatory process" by which it accomplished, "consequent state," ensues. Natural-language like aspects, futurates, adverbials, when-clauses are argued to change temporal/aspectual category propositions under control nucleic knowledge representation structure. The same concept plays role reference, tense, we follow McCawley, Partee, Isard regarding anaphoric category. We claim any manageable formalism for natural-language descriptions will have embody ontology, usable database about interrogated using natural language.