Time: from cognition to language
Michiel van Lambalgen
Universität Amsterdam, Institute for Logic, Language and Computation
Montag, 15.12.2003, 16 Uhr c.t., Hörsaal 9
It is not immediately clear why human beings would experience time at all.
Many skills do not require explicit representations of temporal succession
or duration. There exists some psychological evidence, however, that
conscious awareness of time comes with the capacity for planning. E.g.,
children's ability to use temporal expressions seems to covary with their
ability to recognize plans; and planning deficits covary with temporal
desintegration. If planning is an important determinant of our sense of time,
one might expect that the representation of time in language, as tense and
aspect, shows traces of its origin in planning. Fortunately, this idea is
testable, since planning can be formalized logically, on the basis of logic
programming with negation as failure. We will sketch the resulting semantics,
and show what is predicts for tense and aspect.
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