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<Paper uid="J88-2003">
  <Title>TEMPORAL ONTOLOGY AND TEMPORAL REFERENCE</Title>
  <Section position="11" start_page="26" end_page="26" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
7 CONCLUSION
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Many of the apparent anomalies and ambiguities that plague current semantic accounts of temporal expressions in natural language stem from the assumption that a linear model of time is the one that our linguistic categories are most directly related to. A more principled semantics is possible on the assumption that the temporal categories of tense, aspect, aspectual adverbials, and of propositions themselves refer to a mental representation of events that is structured on other than purely temporal principles, and to which the notion of a nucleus, or contingently related sequence of preparatory process, goal event, and consequent state, is central.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
  <Section position="13" start_page="26" end_page="26" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
NOTES
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> 1. Readers familiar with Vendler's work will realise that we have changed his terminology. We have done so both for notational convenience and to avoid the considerable confusion that has arisen concerning the precise meaning of the old terms. The new nomenclature is also intended to reflect the fact, also noted by Dowty (1979), that Vendler's &amp;quot;accomplishments,&amp;quot; which we will refer to as &amp;quot;culminated processes,&amp;quot; are composite events, consisting of a process which is associated with a particular culmination point.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1">  2. A similar tripartite event structure is proposed in Passonneau (1987, cf. this volume).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> 3. In attributing this view to Reichenbach, we are assuming that there  is an oversight or a misprint in his diagram for the past progressive, p. 290: the diagram seems to suggest that R and E are coextensive, whereas what is intended is that the punctual reference time is included in an extended event time, as in his diagram for the present progressive. We also ignore here one of his analyses of the modal future, which we regard as incorrect (cf. Section 5).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> 4. It is ~.n implication of such an analysis that there should be no truly past w~rsion of epistemically modal propositions. Where past tense s of the epistemic modals do occur, they must, like the past nonntodal future, always be either counterfactual or indirect or repolted speech. This seems to be the case. Mary McCarthy (1974), speaking of David Halberstam's use in The Best and the Brigt~test of &amp;quot;what she could only describe as the Future Past,&amp;quot; as in i. ~,1: a dinner party after the Bay of Pigs Bundy would tell lriends...</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> and ii. The power and prestige that the McNamara years would bring...</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> called it &amp;quot;that awful tense, seeming to endow the author with prophetic powers,&amp;quot; signifying &amp;quot;a future already plangent when it has not yet happened.&amp;quot; The source of that awful power (which also accntes to the past tenses of the nonmodal future and, as McCarthy also remarks, the modal-like &amp;quot;be to&amp;quot; construction), is of course the shifting of the speech or consciousness time into the past, rather than the reference time.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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