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This chapter consists of two main sections and ends with a summary. First, it addresses the description of four types of verbal tense (the simple past, the imperfect, the compound past and the present) in English, French, Italian and Romanian, as presented by grammar books and pragmatic studies focusing on individual verbal tenses. Second, it reviews the semantics of Tense, Aktionsart and Aspect, which are the constituent categories of the generic notion , as they are discussed in general linguistics.

This chapter contains three main sections and ends with a summary. First, I consider the contribution of verbal tenses to discourse interpretation and the calculation of temporal relations in several formal sematic-discursive theories. Second, I discuss Grice’s treatment of temporal relations as conversational implicatures. Third, having briefly introduced the basic tenets of Relevance Theory and the conceptual/procedural distinction, I pay particular attention to the relevance-theoretic account of temporal relations as “pragmatically determined aspects of ”, and to the ongoing debate on the purely procedural vs. mixed nature of the meaning encoded by verbal tenses.

, consists of four main sections and ends with a summary. First, I give an account of the importance of using authentic, naturally occurring and systematic data, as well as of the advantages and limitations of using corpora in linguistic and pragmatic research. Second, I describe the three sets of translation corpora that were compiled for this research: bilingual English-French, bilingual French-English, and multilingual English-French-Italian and Romanian. In these sets of data, I assessed the frequency of verbal tenses in the source language and their translations into a target language.

, includes four main sections and ends with a summary. First, it discusses several issues linked to using annotation data, such as reliability, validity and the measurement of inter-annotator agreement. Following the proposal made in Grisot (J Pragmat 117:245–263, 2017a), inter-annotator agreement rates, measured with the coefficient, are interpreted as dependent on the degree of accessibility to consciousness and the degree of availability to conscious thought, and, as such, on their conceptual or procedural nature. Second, it advances a series of hypotheses regarding the meaning of Tense, Aktionsart and Aspect, and their predictions with respect to comprehenders’ behaviour when they have to evaluate it consciously in annotation experiments. Third, it describes the annotation experiments and discuss their results. Fourth, in order to assess the role of Tense, Aktionsart and Aspect in predicting the verbal tense used in a target language, the results of a generalized mixed model suited to the data are discussed.

This chapter comprises four main sections and ends with a summary. First, it puts forward the HD model, which is an innovative model of temporal reference distinguishing between the temporal information from Tense, Aktionsart, Aspect, Mood, temporal adverbials, temporal connectives, aspectual markers and markedness, among others. Second, it develops a mixed conceptual-procedural account of Tense, by specifying that the notion of , referred to as ConText, is understood as a cognitive construct consisting of a set of assumptions selected during the interpretation process, rather than determined in advance and expanded during the interpretation process when the expectation of relevance is satisfied or abandoned. In the ConText, the comprehender inferentially constructs the conceptual content of Tense and Aktionsart, and makes use of the procedural information encoded by Tense and Aspect in order to manipulate the conceptual representations built. Third, it revisits the verbal tenses investigated in this book according to the HD model.

This chapter consists of four main sections and ends with a summary. First, it provides a general account of coherence relations as cognitive entities, and focus on the status of temporal relations. Second, in order to support the proposal that temporal relations are cognitively motivated, it addresses the results of a series of online and offline experiments carried out in order to test the processing and conscious evaluation of temporal relations, as expressed by the French Passé Composé versus the Passé Simple, and by the temporal connectives and . Third, the notion of cognitive temporal coherence is discussed, by arguing that the cohesive ties investigated in this research are cognitively motivated categories, and by exploring a psycholinguistic account of coherence according to which mental representations of discourse segments are structured and coherent.

This chapter contains two main sections and ends with a summary. First, it reviews the literature on Natural Language Processing and Machine Translation which has investigated temporal information. Second, it describes the automatic implementation of [±narrativity] and [±boundedness], and show that these are effective at improving the results of statistical machine translation systems, in terms of lexical choices of verbs and of verbal tenses in automatically translated texts.