Together with Fritz Hamm (Linguistics, Tuebingen) I am writing a book provisionally entitled "The Proper Treatment of Events", which will appear with Blackwell (Oxford and Boston) in the series 'Explorations in Semantics' edited by Susan Rothstein. The book presents a novel approach to the semantics of tense and aspect. The purpose of the book is to demonstrate that the combination of an event calculus as developed in Artificial Intelligence with a type free theory developed by S. Feferman and logic programming techniques allows us to formulate an axiomatised semantic theory which has a broad range of linguistic applications. Apart from a precise notion of 'eventuality' this system permits us to formalise the notion of 'reification' so prominent in natural language semantics, philosophy of language and artificial intelligence.
We will provide reasons for the empirical adequacy of the combined system by giving detailed analyses of different types of nominalisations, aspectual classes, the progressive, and the phenomenon of reinterpretation of aspectual classes (coercion). Moreover we will argue that both typological and historical investigations support the suggested analyses. The languages studied include English, French and Russian.
Each of the applications emphasises a different part of the formalism, although all of them need the whole system. Moreover the system lends itself very well for natural language processing, since it is formulated in a (constraint) logic programming framework.
It will furthermore be argued that the proposed architecture, which sees the heart of the semantics of tense and aspect in the notion of planning, has cognitive plausibility. The argument proceeds via an examination of the role of time in cognitive processes.
The book will be of interest to theoretical linguists, in particular to advanced students and scholars in semantics and computational linguistics, or in neighboring fields such as pragmatics, syntax, typology and historical linguistics. It will also be of interest to students and researchers in philosophy of language, logic, and cognitive science, and to computer scientists with an interest in logic and natural language semantics.
