A Computational Treatment of Sentence-Final 'then'

We describe a computational system which parses discourses consisting of sequences of simple sentences. These contain a range of temporal constructions, including time adverbials, progressive aspect and various aspectual classes. In particular, the grammar generates the required readings, according to the theoretical analysis of (Glasbey, forthcoming), for sentence-final 'then'. 1 Sentence-final 'then' It is possible to follow: (la) Emily climbed Ben Nevis in July. with (lb) Fiona climbed Snowdon then. This is interpreted to mean that each climb took place at some time within the July in question. Notice, however, that if we remove 'in July' from (la) to give: (lc) Emily climbed Ben Nevis. the sequence (lc,lb) becomes harder to interpret and sounds rather odd.1 The difference is, of course, that we have removed 'in July' and there is no longer an explicit reference to a "time". We will call such an explicitly mentioned time an explicit...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1993
• Where: EACL
• Authors: Sheila Glasbey
• Keywords: Ben Nevis, Climb Took Place, EACL 1993, Fiona Climbed Snowdon, Natural Language Processing