Time representation in sentence comprehension

Language Learning, 2008

ABSTRACT The article first discusses some recent work in time perception—in particular the distinction among prospective timing, retrospective timing, and passage of time judgments. The history and application of an “internal clock” model as an explanation of prospective timing performance is reviewed and contrasted with the different mechanisms needed for the other two types of time judgments. The article then discusses two areas suggesting relations between time perception research and language. The first is the idea that disturbances in the perception of duration, usually of very brief auditory stimuli, are associated with some language disorders. Another is the common use of metaphors for time, and the article relates these to the issue of whether a genuine “time sense” exists.

In: K. Jaszczolt & L. de Saussure, eds, 2013, Time: Language, Cognition, and Reality, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1-11

Representing time in language is one of the most debated issues in semantics, philosophy and cognitive science and yet it is ridden with unresolved questions, puzzles and paradoxes.

2009

First, I want to sincerely thank my advisor James F. Allen for always being very welcoming, considerate, understanding, and encouraging. He gave me the freedom to pursue my own research, and at the same time provided me with ideas and support whenever I needed -not to mention the torture I did to him with the first draft of my documents, including this thesis, which he patiently went through and returned with insightful feedback. My special thanks to Jeffery P. Bigham for giving me the opportunity to be exposed to the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) area, and to collaborate on exciting projects. I want to especially thank Lenhart K. Schubert for giving me constructive suggestions on various topics and for our fruitful discussions on the Timegraph (section 5.3.1

Minds and Machines, 1997

1998

I present a new problem for the tense realist concerning the evaluation of cross-temporal claims, such as ‘John is now taller than Michael was in 1984’. Time can play two different roles in the evaluation of an utterance of a sentence: either as an element that completes the content expressed by the utterance (the completion role), or as part of the circumstances against which the content is evaluated (the evaluation role). It is this latter role that time plays in the realist view of tenses. I argue that if the content of a cross-temporal sentence is taken at face value (as an ascription of a crosstemporally instantiated relation), time does not play the evaluation role. Therefore, the world of the tense realist seems to leave no room for cross-temporality.

The present article investigates the category of temporality in the English language and demonstrates the ways of its expression in English sentences. The author enumerates types of adverbial modifier of time and enlightens the problem of expression of temporality in the structure of English sentence. The article covers a deep linguistic analysis of the syntactic component of adverbial modifier of time in English. The article provides a definition of the grammatical term \"adverbial modifier of time\" and ways of its expression in English sentences.

Final version available in Language and Cognition 10: 26-55, 2018

Forthcoming in Language and Cognition. Special issue Time ed. by V. Evans and C. Sinha 'Sometimes I feel that life is passing me by, not slowly either, but with ropes of steam and spark-spattered wheels and a hoarse roar of power or terror. It's passing, yet I'm the one who is doing all the moving. I'm not the station, I'm not the stop: I'm the train. I'm the train.' Martin Amis, Money, 1984, London: Vintage Books, p. 112.

This paper describes a method to represent temporal localization in such a way that it could be used in a system for natural language processing. We show that linguistic information is not su cient to deal with temporal localization adverbials in natural language processing. A representation of time with a greater level of abstraction must be used. We propose an implementation of such a representation, based on a type lattice structure, and a method for interfacing this representation with discourse.

Linguistics in The Netherlands, 2000

Human Cognitive Processing, 2016

Do people think about time the way they talk about it? This chapter examines dissociations between temporal language and temporal thinking in speakers of English and of Darija, a dialect of Moroccan Arabic. In both languages, conventional metaphors suggest that the future is ahead of the speaker and the past is behind. Yet, English speakers typically conceptualize the future as rightward and the past as leftwarda spatial mapping that is not conventionalized in any known spoken language. Darija speakers typically conceptualize the past as ahead and the future a behind them-a spatial mapping that directly contradicts their verbal metaphors. Darija speakers' "backward" mapping of time does not appear to arise from any feature of their language, or from their physical experience with the natural world, but rather from their cultural bias to focus on the past (i.e., to value their ancestry and practice ancient traditions). Analyses of verbal space-time metaphors reveal that humans' temporal thinking depends, in part, on spatial mappings. Yet, essential features of these mappings, including their spatial orientation and direction, may be absent from language and can only be discovered using extra-linguistic methods. Beyond the influences of language and of physical experience, cultural values and non-linguistic cultural practices can play important roles in shaping our mental representations of time. As a result, at any moment people may be thinking about time differently from the way they are talking about it, using different spatial schemas.

Three reasons render the expression of temporality a particularly in-teresting issue in language acquisition research. Firstly, temporality is a fundamental category of human experience and cognition, and all human languages have developed a wide range of devices to express it. These devices are similar, but not identical, across languages, and this well-defined, or at least well-definable, variability presents the learner with a clear set of acquisitional problems, and allows the re-searcher to study in which order, and in which way, these problems are approached. Secondly, the expression of temporality in a par-ticular language typically involves the interplay of several means -lexical (eg., inherent verb meaning), morphological (e.g., tense mark-ing), syntactic (e.g., position of temporal adverbs), pragmatic (e.g., rules of discourse organisation). This allows the researcher to study how an interacting system, rather than some isolated phenomenon, is acquired. Thirdly, one major ...

Memory & Cognition

It is widely accepted that people can predict the relative imminence of future events. However, it is unknown whether the timing of future events is represented using only a "strength-like" estimate or if future events are represented conjunctively with their position on a mental timeline. We examined how people judge temporal relationships among anticipated future events using the novel Judgment of Anticipated Co-Occurrence (JACO) task. Participants were initially trained on a stream of letters sampled from a probabilistically repeating sequence. During test trials, the stream was interrupted with pairs of probe letters and the participants' task was to choose the probe letter they expected to appear in the stream during a lagged target window 4-6 items (4.3-8.5 s) in the future. Participants performed above chance as they gained experience with the task. Because the correct item was sometimes the more imminent probe letter and other times the less imminent probe letter, these results rule out the possibility that participants relied solely on thresholding a strength-like estimate of temporal imminence. Rather, these results suggest that participants held (1) temporally organized predictions of the future letters in the stream, (2) a temporal estimate of the lagged target window, and (3) some means to compare the two and evaluate their temporal alignment. Response time increased with the lag to the more imminent probe letter, suggesting that participants accessed the future sequentially in a manner that mirrors scanning processes previously proposed to operate on memory representations in the short-term judgment of recency task.

Research in Language 12 (4), 2014

The paper investigates the possible conceptual bases of differences between seemingly synonymous and easily definable temporal expressions. Looking at the usage patterns of nominal temporal phrases in reference corpora of English and Polish we attempt to relate these subtleties to the different granularity of the cognitive scales on which construals of time quantities in general are based. More specifically, we focus on a subset of nominal temporal expressions which adhere to the "number + time unit" pattern, matching what Haspelmath (1997: 26) describes as "culture-bound artificial time units". Using the British National Corpus (BNC) and the National Corpus of Polish (NCP), we first analyse both the variation and the regularity found in naturally-occurring samples of Polish and English. Finally, we compare the patterns of use emerging from the two corpora and arrive at cross-linguistic generalisations about the conceptualisation of time quantities.