review
This is an intriguing review.
"It provides a formalization of the notion of event (using a modification of Shanahan’s [1997] version of the Event Calculus, a many-sorted first-order theory), defines a dynamic-style semantics for the system, and discusses how constraint logic programming can be used to cash out its computational content. ... a detailed exploration of the ramifications of a single idea:... to properly understand how temporal expressions in natural language work, we must understand how human beings construct time, and that the cognitive construction of time is best explicated in terms of planning and causality. Planning is the glue that lets human minds integrate past, present, and future, and episodic memory (which Lambalgen and Hamm view as a “generalised capacity for imagining or constructing possible worlds”) is the key to this capacity." I am interested in causality and causal constraints, partly to harness in a situation theoretic semantics of verbs. The role of episodic memory may help clarify the role of consciousness.
"they broadly agree with Moschovakis’s (1993) interpretation of the Fregean notion of sense: The sense of an expression is the algorithm that computes its reference....Causality, the key relation between events, is presented in two variants: instantaneous change and continuous change. Moreover, in addition to this general background theory, they also allow for the constructions of “scenarios,” microtheories stating the specific causal relationships holding in a given situation (this machinery underlies their account of lexical meanings)....a theory that is carefully axiomatized. The authors consider various models for their theory, paying particular attention to minimal models, for they make a closed-world assumption in which anything that is not forced to happen does not happen....the authors distance themselves both from DRT (Kampand Reyle 1993) (because of its reliance on Davidson-style events with predicates corresponding to thematic roles) and from Amsterdam-style dynamic semantics (Groenendijk and Stokhof 1991) (which they view as treating computation implicitly rather than explicitly)." I definitely want to see why they reject DRT, and their ideas on events and thematic roles.
"Part III of the book (which, at around 160 pages, is by far the longest section) puts this apparatus to work to construct a theory of tense and aspect. Every VP is associated with a default scenario (that is, a microtheory) that determines the Aktionsart of the verb. The word “default” is important: temporal and aspectual operators, and many other linguistic items, may coerce the verb to assume a different Aktionsart...this book treats temporal and aspectual phenomena from a perspective very different from that of current corpusbased work. But it does so systematically and with great precision.... Interested in temporal semantics? Then this is essential reading." Again, this should help come up with a verb semantics, verb morphology construction semantics and also a clausal construction semantics.
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