Temporal centering

Abstract

We present a semantic and pragmatic account of the anaphoric properties of past and perfect that improves on previous work by integrating discourse structure, aspectual type, surface structure and commonsense knowledge. A novel aspect of our account is that we distinguish between two kinds of temporal intervals in the interpretation of temporal operators - discourse reference intervals and event intervals. This distinction makes it possible to develop an analogy between centering and temporal centering, which operates on discourse reference intervals. Our temporal property-sharing principle is a defeasible inference rule on the logical form. Along with lexical and causal reasoning, it plays a role in incrementally resolving underspecified aspects of the event structure representation of an utterance against the current context.