Identifying and Computing Temporal Locating Adverbials with a Particular Focus on Portuguese and English

Abstract

This dissertation deals with the semantics of temporal locating adverbials, comprising two main topics: first, the identification of this class of expressions, by distinguishing between it and other classes – namely temporal measure adverbials and time-denoting expressions – whose semantic proximity raises important categorisation issues; second, the semantic computation of temporal locating adverbials in the formal framework of Discourse Representation Theory, taking the presentation of Kamp and Reyle (1993) as the basic reference. The second topic necessarily leads to the analysis of the interaction between adverbial temporal location and other semantic domains that significantly affect the relations expressed by locating adverbials, among which Aktionsart, causality and quantification stand out.