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<Paper uid="J88-2003">
  <Title>TEMPORAL ONTOLOGY AND TEMPORAL REFERENCE</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
2 TEMPORAL AND ASPECTUAL CATEGORIES
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Propositions conveyed by English sentences uttered in context can, following Vendler, be classified into temporal or aspectual types, partly on the basis of the tenses, aspects, and adverbials with which they can co-occur (cf. Dowty 1979, and the introduction to the present collection). The term aspectual type refers to the relation that a speaker predicates of the particular happening that their utterance describes, relative to other happenings in the domain of the discourse. What the speaker says about those relations is of course quite distinct from what those relations objectively are. In partictdar, the speaker's predications about events will typically be coloured by the fact that those events are involved in sequences that are planned, predicted, intended, or otherwise governed by agencies of one kind or another. For want of some established term to cover this very general class of dependencies between events, we will use the term contingency. Thus an utterance of 4. Harry reached the top is usually typical of what we will call a culmination-informally, an event which the speaker views as punctual or instantaneous, and as accompanied by a transition to a new state of the world. ~ This new state we will refer to as the consequent state of the event. It does not necessarily include all events that are objectively and in fact consequences. It rather includes only those consequences that the speaker views as contingently related to other events that are under discussion, say by causing them or by permitting them to occur. For reasons that are discussed in Section 3.2 below, expressions like these readily combine with the perfect, as in 5. Harry has reached the top.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> The point may perhaps best be made by noting that there is another class of punctual expressions that is not normally associated with a consequent state. For example, null</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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