Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics Cristina Grisot Cohesion, Coherence and Temporal Reference from an Experimental Corpus Pragmatics Perspective Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics Editor-in-Chief Jesús Romero-Trillo, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain Reviews Editor Dawn Knight, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK Advisory Editorial Board Karin Aijmer, University of Gothenburg, Sweden Belén Díez-Bedmar, Universidad de Jaén, Spain Ronald Geluykens, University of Oldenburg, Germany Anna Gladkova, University of Sussex and University of Brighton, UK Stefan Gries: University of California, Santa Barbara, USA Leo Francis Hoye, University of Hong Kong, China Jingyang Jiang, Zhejiang University, China Anne O’Keefe, Mary Immaculate College, Limerick, Ireland Silvia Riesco-Bernier, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain Anne-Marie Simon-Vandenbergen, University of Ghent, Belgium Esther Vázquez y del Árbol, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain Anne Wichmann, University of Central Lancashire, UK More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/11559 Cristina Grisot Cohesion, Coherence and Temporal Reference from an Experimental Corpus Pragmatics Perspective Cristina Grisot Department of Linguistics University of Geneva Geneva 4, Switzerland Published with the support of the Swiss National Science Foundation ISSN 2213-6819 ISSN 2213-6827 (electronic) Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics ISBN 978-3-319-96751-6 ISBN 978-3-319-96752-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96752-3 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018950536 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018. 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This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Acknowledgements This book is the achievement of several years of research on time, which started when I was a PhD student at the University of Geneva and continued with my post- doctoral research at the universities of Neuchâtel and of Geneva. I wish to express my immense gratitude to Jacques Moeschler, my PhD supervisor and now an irre- placeable colleague, whose energy, sincerity, creativity and originality continue to inspire me in my work. His constant support and wise advice have been footholds on my path. I would like to express my deepest appreciation to the other members of the thesis committee for their useful comments and suggestions: Jesús Romero- Trillo, Vladimir Žegarac, Andrei Popescu-Belis, Louis de Saussure and Eric Wehrli. I would like thank Louis de Saussure in particular, who welcomed me into his team at the University of Neuchâtel when I started to write my PhD thesis and where I have spent several years for teaching. I want to thank colleagues with whom I col- laborated for the research in this book: Bruno Cartoni, Thomas Meyer, Andrei Popescu- Belis, Sharid Loáiciga, Michèle Costagliola D’Abele, Joanna Blochowiak, Juan Sun and Jacques Moeschler. Thank you, dear colleagues, for everything you have brought me: the knowledge, the questions and the challenges. I would like to extend my deepest thanks to all those who have given me practical help on the manuscript, be it rereading, proofreading or the drawing of syntactic trees, to name but a few: your contributions are invaluable! I would also like to express my grati- tude to the experimental participants for taking the time to read and to annotate the sentences in an accurate manner. I wish to recognize those who supported this research financially: the Swiss National Science Foundation, for financing the COMTIS and MODERN projects and for funding the OA publication1; the University of Geneva, for the Tremplin grant which allowed me to work full time on the thesis manuscript; and the University of Neuchâtel, for the Egalité grant which allowed me to finish the book manuscript. Special thanks are due to the reviewers of 1 Published with the support of the Swiss National Science Foundation v vi Acknowledgements the book manuscript, to the editor Jesús Romero-Trillo who accepted this monogra- phy for publication in the Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics series, whose advice in preparing this book for publication has been priceless, and to all members of the Springer editorial and production team for their help and support, especially to Jolanda Voogd for her patience. Most of all, I wish to thank my family for their love and support, especially my husband Sébastien and my children Emma and Luca for being there and making each day of my life blossom a little more than the last. Introduction Despite the considerable amount of published literature on temporal reference and its linguistic expression, no previous study has dealt with verbal tenses in general and more specifically the categories of Tense, lexical aspect (hereafter, Aktionsart) and grammatical aspect (hereafter, Aspect) as cohesion ties contributing to the tem- poral coherence of a discourse from an empirical and an experimental perspective. This work aims to provide new methodological and theoretical insights into tempo- ral reference and its linguistic components, from an experimental corpus pragmatics approach. This book, published in the Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics series, illustrates how the study of linguistic and pragmatic phenomena benefits from the combination of two approaches: on the one hand, the rigorous and meticulous methodology found in the domains of corpus linguistics and psycholin- guistics and, on the other hand, the rich theoretical understanding of language and the interpretation of sentence meaning and intended meaning provided by the fields of theoretical linguistics and pragmatics. As such, it investigates the phenomenon of temporal reference at the interface between corpus linguistics, theoretical linguis- tics and pragmatics, experimental pragmatics, psycholinguistics, natural language processing and machine translation. The line of research adopted in this book shows how theoretical studies bring forth new hypotheses about language meaning and language use, which are tested in both naturally occurring data and carefully designed experiments. This empirical and experimental testing provides evidence which might lead to the revision, if necessary, of the initial theoretical models. This book will give readers insights into how they can develop solid, empirically and experimentally based theoretical models of linguistic phenomena. Since Halliday and Hasan’s seminal work on cohesion in English (1976), the notions of coherence, cohesion and cohesive ties have been used extensively in reference to a series of phenomena, such as pronominal, demonstrative and com- parative reference. In this book, I deal with temporal reference – the localization of eventualities (states and events) in time – in natural language and its role in estab- lishing temporal cohesion and coherence. There are numerous ways in which tem- poral reference may be expressed, such as the grammatical categories of Tense and Aspect (generally referred to by the generic notion verbal tense), inherent temporal vii viii Introduction features of the verb phrase (known as lexical/situation aspect or Aktionsart), tempo- ral adverbials and connectives (such as yesterday and before, special particles such as the Mandarin Chinese aspectual particles -le and -guo, and pragmatic inferential principles of discourse comprehension, among others). In tensed languages, the pri- mary focus of research on temporal reference has been Tense, with Aspect and Aktionsart secondary considerations. Crosslinguistic research from formal seman- tics over the past 40 years has pointed out that there are languages without the gram- matical category of Tense (the so-called tenseless languages, such as Mandarin Chinese and Yucatec, Mayan, Mexico) and mixed-tense languages (with optional tense marking alongside untensed clauses, such as Navajo,