Tense and temporal interpretation

The grammatical forms known as tenses establish the time talked about in a sentence, in conjunction with other temporal expressions. Tense expresses a relation between Speech Time and Reference Time; the relation between Situation Time and Reference Time is under-specified for most tenses, though specified as simultaneous for English will. Tense interpretation depends on syntactic and discourse context at the level of the passage. Passages realize one of several Discourse Modes; each mode has distinctive linguistic characteristics. Tense conveys continuity in Narrative, while in Description tense is anaphoric. In Report and all other modes, tense is deictic. Temporal interpretation is determined by interpretive rules that take as input the surface structure of a sentence and the context in which it appears. Rules and interpretations are developed in the framework of Discourse Representation Theory. The information relevant to temporal interpretation is conveyed by features associated with tenses and adverbs by syntactic configuration, and by discourse context.