Temporal reasoning in natural language understanding: the temporal structure of the narrative

  • Authors:

  • Alexander Nakhimovsky

  • Affiliations:

  • Colgate University, Hamilton, NY

  • Venue:
  • EACL '87 Proceedings of the third conference on European chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
  • Year:
  • 1987

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Abstract

This paper proposes a new framework for discourse analysis, in the spirit of Grosz and Sidner (1986), Webber (1987a,b) but differentiated with respect to the type or genre of discourse. It is argued that different genres call for different representations and processing strategies; particularly important is the distinction between subjective, performative discourse and objective discourse, of which narrative is a primary example. This paper concentrates on narratives and introduces the notions of temporal focus (proposed also in Webber (1987b)) and narrative move. The processing tasks involved in reconstructing the temporal structure of a narrative (Webber's e/s structure) are formulated in terms of these two notions. The remainder of the paper analyzes the durational and aspectual knowledge needed for those tasks. Distinctions are established between grammatical aspect, aspectual class and the aspectual perspective of a sentence in discourse; it is shown that in English, grammatical aspect under-determines the aspectual perspective.