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<Paper uid="J88-2004">
  <Title>ASPECT, ASPECTUAL CLASS, AND THE TEMPORAL STRUCTURE OF NARRATIVE</Title>
  <Section position="11" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
8 CONCLUSIONS
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> This paper suggests several empirical investigations having to do with the lexicon and discourse. In conclusion, I would like to recapitulate them and outline some possible ways to proceed.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> In order to enter durational information into the lexicon, the time-measurement units need to be identified, from moment, minute, and five minutes to year and decade. Then, for many, perhaps most, h-types, their time scales can be characterized by a sequence of such units, e.g., visit-1 \[minutes, hours\] &amp;quot;visit somebody&amp;quot; (as opposed to visit-2 \[days\] &amp;quot;visit with somebody&amp;quot;). Two h-types stand in the much-greater-than relation to each other if their time scales do not overlap.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Aspectually, each h-type should be assigned to a class according to the classification developed in Section 4. Regular aspectual polysemies should be noted and their extent investigated. It would be helpful to know, for example, how many, and what kind of, process verbs can describe the instantaneous beginning of the process as in She ran (i.e., began to run). For telic h-types, as argued in Section 4, there is a limited number of ways in which the arguments of the h-type can be affected by it (create, destroy, move, modify, expend: see Section 4.2). These ways can be catalogued and used as labels on the appropriate slots of lexical representations. Qualitative dependencies between arguments can be described using Forbus's (1985) approach. (Nakhimovsky 1987a has examples.) A lexicon so outfitted can be used in a constraint propagation program, similar to the Allen and Kautz 1985 experiment, in a manner described in Section 4.6.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> With respect to narratives, two investigations are in order, one concerning micromoves within a DS, the other concerning macromoves and DS boundaries. The aim of the former investigation would be to identify the most frequent temporal/causal patterns of micromoves and how they are signaled by tense and aspect. The aims of the latter investigation would be, first, to identify the types of discontinuities that cause the shift to a new DS; second, identify typical combinations of such discontinuities and how they correspond to rhetorical notions and the narrator's intentions; and finally, develop heuristics for the proper segmentation of narratives. At this stage, work outlined here is likely to connect with some of the pursuits of structuralist and poststructuralist poetics.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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