Tense and Aspect. Hamm, F. & Bott, O. In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, Fall 2018 edition, 2018.
Tense and Aspect [link]Paper  abstract   bibtex   
Many languages have grammatical means to indicate the time when anaction or event occurs, or when a state or process holds. Thisphenomenon is called tense. In English, for example, addingthe morpheme -ed to the verb walk, to formwalked, indicates that the event denoted by the verb occurredbefore the present time. What is called aspect, on the otherhand, deals with the internal constituency of actions, events, states,processes or situations. For instance, it may indicate that an actionis completed or still ongoing. English typically uses the-ing form of verbs to indicate ongoing processes, as inHe is building a house. , After a short introduction to basic notions of tense and aspect webriefly discuss temporal logic, and then Reichenbach’s famousdistinction between speech time, event time and referencetime. Event-based semantic theories treat events as ontologicalprimitives, so in the following section we show how time can beconstructed from event structures, as exemplified by the Russell-Kampconstruction. These sections are followed by a discussion of the mostimportant observations concerning lexical and grammatical aspect,including the famous imperfective paradox. Next we introduce twowidely discussed theories of temporality and show how they cope withthe imperfective paradox. This section is followed by one that showshow temporal information is expressed in Artificial Intelligence(AI). We use the event calculus from AI to present a solution of theimperfective paradox, by viewing it as an instance of the frameproblem. The last section is devoted to gathering psycholinguisticevidence showing that at least some of the philosophical and semanticconcepts discussed in this article may be cognitively real.
@incollection{hamm_tense_2018,
	edition = {Fall 2018},
	title = {Tense and {Aspect}},
	url = {https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2018/entriesense-aspect/},
	abstract = {Many languages have grammatical means to indicate the time when anaction or event occurs, or when a state or process holds. Thisphenomenon is called tense. In English, for example, addingthe morpheme -ed to the verb walk, to formwalked, indicates that the event denoted by the verb occurredbefore the present time. What is called aspect, on the otherhand, deals with the internal constituency of actions, events, states,processes or situations. For instance, it may indicate that an actionis completed or still ongoing. English typically uses the-ing form of verbs to indicate ongoing processes, as inHe is building a house. , After a short introduction to basic notions of tense and aspect webriefly discuss temporal logic, and then Reichenbach’s famousdistinction between speech time, event time and referencetime. Event-based semantic theories treat events as ontologicalprimitives, so in the following section we show how time can beconstructed from event structures, as exemplified by the Russell-Kampconstruction. These sections are followed by a discussion of the mostimportant observations concerning lexical and grammatical aspect,including the famous imperfective paradox. Next we introduce twowidely discussed theories of temporality and show how they cope withthe imperfective paradox. This section is followed by one that showshow temporal information is expressed in Artificial Intelligence(AI). We use the event calculus from AI to present a solution of theimperfective paradox, by viewing it as an instance of the frameproblem. The last section is devoted to gathering psycholinguisticevidence showing that at least some of the philosophical and semanticconcepts discussed in this article may be cognitively real.},
	urldate = {2020-01-29},
	booktitle = {The {Stanford} {Encyclopedia} of {Philosophy}},
	publisher = {Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University},
	author = {Hamm, Friedrich and Bott, Oliver},
	editor = {Zalta, Edward N.},
	year = {2018},
	keywords = {discourse representation theory, events, logic: non-monotonic, logic: temporal, mereology, time: the experience and perception of},
}

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