Jacques Moeschler, Cristina Grisot, Bruno Cartoni, Unige
This paper is based on descriptive, empirical and theoretical studies on verbal tenses in a cross-lingual perspective. This research is part of a larger project, COMTIS (Improving the coherence of machine translation output by modeling intersentential relations), which aims at applying the result of semantic and pragmatic analyses of tenses, mainly their aspectual, temporal and constructional properties, to improve automatic translation systems. In this project, extensive contrastive analyses are performed on parallel corpora (mainly in French and English). Analysing verbal tense through a contrastive perspective helps to improve the understanding of the tense system in the considered languages.
The main purpose of this contribution is to discuss to which extent temporal and aspectual features are procedural or conceptual. This issue is relevant inasmuch directional inferences are the result of linguistic and contextual information. The comparison between tense systems based on contrastive analysis should shed light on how procedural and conceptual are equally or differently encoded in tenses, verbs and connective. As a guideline, we hypothesise that directional information is typically procedural and that temporal and causal relations, as well as perspectival information are conceptual. Tests as described in Moeschler (2010) will be used.
Our main hypothesis is that verbal systems of different languages rely on common basic features, responsible for temporal location, temporal relations and aspectual representation. We hypothesise that the main differences in behaviours of tense pairs between different languages are due to different semantic encodings of temporal and aspectual features, all of these being computed according to other temporal and/or aspectual features encoded in different lexical categories, such as connectives and verbs.
The general framework is the Directional Model and Mental Representation Theory (Moeschler 2000 & Reboul 2000). Tenses are basically defined by a set of directional features, responsible for directional (forward and backward) and for inclusion relationships between events. Moreover, aspectual properties, such as boundedness, internal vs. external perspectives, should also be encoded in a system of aspectual features, combining with temporal and directional features. For instance, the internal perspective feature should be compatible with a forward directional feature when the French imparfait receives a narrative reading (imparfait de rupture).
References
Moeschler J. (2000), “Le Modèle des Inferences Directionnelles”, Cahiers de linguistique française 22, 57-100.
Reboul A. (2000), “La representation des éventualités dans le la Théorie des Représentations Mentales”, Cahiers de linguistique française 22, 13-55.
Moeschler J. (2010), “Negation as a test to the conceptual/procedural distinction”, submitted.