Tense, Aspect and the Temporal Structure of Discourse: Towards an LFG Account

This paper is based on my contribution to the workshop on Tense and Aspect at LFG01. In it, I consider the question of how information relating to tense, aspect and the temporal structure of discourse should best be encoded in LFG. I will focus in particular on what temporal information needs to be represented if we are to be able to map from the LFG formalism to some semantic representation which captures the temporal structure of continuous discourse. In particular, I will derive a preliminary set of features which are intended to be used cross-linguistically to represent tense- and aspect- related information.