Cohesion, Coherence and Temporal Reference from an Experimental Corpus Pragmatics Perspective

Abstract

This open access book provides new methodological and theoretical insights into temporal reference and its linguistic expression, from a cross-linguistic experimental corpus pragmatics approach. Verbal tenses, in general, and more specifically the categories of tense, grammatical and lexical aspect are treated as cohesion ties contributing to the temporal coherence of a discourse, as well as to the cognitive temporal coherence of the mental representations built in the language comprehension process. As such, it investigates the phenomenon of temporal reference at the interface between corpus linguistics, theoretical linguistics and pragmatics, experimental pragmatics, psycholinguistics, natural language processing and machine translation.