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<Paper uid="P90-1016">
  <Title>A SIMPLIFIED THEORY OF TENSE REPRESENTATIONS AND CONSTRAINTS ON THEIR COMPOSITION</Title>
  <Section position="8" start_page="125" end_page="125" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
6 Conclusions
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> This paper describes two contributions to the theory of temporal/causal adjunction beyond those of Yip (1986), Brent (1989), and Hornstein (1990). First, we propose the asymmetric, default-based interpretation of comma described in (4). This leads to a uniform, semantically based theory explaining the assignments of STSs to tenses shown in Table 2, the incompatibility of many tense pairs in causal/temporal adjunction, and the interpretations of combined tense structures in a variety of situations. In particular, the default based interpretation of comma has benefits both in the interpretation of SR relations (adverbs and clausal adjuncts) and ER relations (event order in CTSs). Few of the theoretical observations or hypotheses presented in this paper constitute radical departures from previous assaults on the same problem. Rather, this paper has worked out inconsistencies and redundancies in earlier attempts. Besides theoretical work, we presented a computer implementation and showed that it can be used to do structural disambiguation of a certain class of sentences. Although our contribution to syntactic disambiguation only solves a small part of that huge problem, we expect that a series of constrained syntactic/semantic theories of the kind proposed hear will yield significant progress.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Finally, the adjustments we have suggested to the interpretation of comma in both simple tense structures and combined tense structures should contribute to the work of the many researchers using Reichenbachian representations. In particular, constrained combination of tense structures ought to provide a richer set of representations on which to expand model-theoretic approaches to interpretation.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>