Tense, aspect, and cognitive representation of time

• Authors: Kenneth Man-kam Yip
• Venue: IJCAI'85 Proceedings of the 9th international joint conference on Artificial intelligence - Volume 2
• Year: 1985

This paper explores the relationships between a computational theory of temporal representation (as developed by james Allen) and a formal lingustic theory of lense (as developed by Norbert Hornstein) and aspect. It aims to provide explicit answers to four fundamental questions (1) what is the computational justification for the permitives of a linguistic theory; (2) what is the computational explanation of the formal grammatical contraints. (3) what are the processing constraints imposed on the learnability and markedness of these theoretical constructs and (4) what are the constraints a linguistic theory imposes or representations. We show that one can effectively exploit the interface between the language faculty and the cognitive faculties by using lingustic constrants to determine restrictions on the cognitive representations and vice versa. Theree man results are obtained (1) We derive an explanation of an observed grammatical constraint on tense. the property of the constraint propagation algorithm of Allen's temporal system; (2) We formulate a principle of markedness for the basic tense structures based on the computation efficiency of the temporal representations, and (3) We show Allen's interval-based temporal system is not arbitrary, but it can be used to explain independently motivated linguistic contraints on tense and aspect interpretations. We also claim that the methodology of research developed in this study "cross-level" investigation of independently motivated formal grammatical theory and computational models is a powerful paradigm with which to attach representational problems in basic cognitive domains. e.g., space, time, causality, etc.