Spatial, temporal and spatio-temporal locating adverbials in discourse

Nicholas Asher (1) , Michel Aurnague (2) , Myriam Bras (3) , Laure Vieu (4, 5)

1 University of Texas at Austin [Austin]
2 ERSS - Equipe de Recherche en Syntaxe et Sémantique
3 IRIT-LILaC - Logique, Interaction, Langue et Calcul
4 IRIT-MELODI - MEthodes et ingénierie des Langues, des Ontologies et du DIscours
5 CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

This paper deals with the semantics of French adverbials that can be used to localise the eventualities of a discourse (events and states) in space and/or in time. The discourses that are considered are narratives describing trajectories. We propose both a linguistic description and a formal representation in order to model the contribution of these adverbials to the spatio-temporal structure of a discourse. The descriptive part tries to classify temporal and spatial adverbials according to the different interpretations they can give rise (spatial, temporal and spatio-temporal). We show that several other factors also condition these possible interpretations (aspectuality, discourse context, etc.). The formalisation of adverbial semantics is done within Segmented Discourse Representation Theory.

Mots clés: SDRT; spatio-temporal structure of discourse; locating adverbials; descriptions of trajectories

Domaines: Linguistique

Nicholas Asher, Michel Aurnague, Myriam Bras, Laure Vieu. Spatial, temporal and spatio-temporal locating adverbials in discourse. 5th international workshop on Time, Space and Movement (TSM 1995), Jun 1995, Bonas, France. pp.107-119 (A). ⟨hal-00671569⟩