Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The process of determining the temporal structure of a narrative text is extremely complex. In this paper, we examine a small but central part of this process: the roles of aspectual class and the progressive/non-progressive distinction. A standard set of aspectual calsses is presented and the temporal effects of each of these classes is discussed. Finally we briefly discuss an implementation of a system which can read a simple narrative text and construct a model of the temporal structure of that text.