Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This paper outlines a general framework for giving the meanings of temporal prepositions (and some related adverbials) in English. The framework takes the form of a method for translating English sentences involving these adverbials into an expressively limited temporal logic, whose operators permit only restricted quantification over subintervals of a given interval. We illustrate our approach with reference to the temporal adverbials one Monday, every Monday, on Monday, in July, for five minutes and in two hours. W e pay special attention to sentences containing multiple temporal adverbials. In particular, we show how some of our Unguistic intuitions concerning the acceptability of combinations of temporal adverbials prevent us from entertaining sentences that are either logical falsdioods or logically equivalent to simpler sentences.