Abstract
Taxonomies of the temporal subordinating conjunctions and prepositions in English, Dutch and German are presented. These high frequency words are highly ambiguous. So a good taxonomy is of practical importance for computerized Natural Language understanding or translation system.
It is also of psychological importance. By examining the taxonomies that we have developed for different languages, we see that certain features are common across languages, for example before and after, and their equivalents in other languages can qualify any type of temporal point or interval. Other features are idiosyncratic. For instance, in English night is treated differently from the other parts of the day: in the morning/at night. The extent of the idiosyncratic features is a sure indication of associative learning that must take place during language acquisition. However all is not ruleless. This agrees with a theory of the mind as a hybrid system capable of learning and using not only regularities but also a large number of individual associations.
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References
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Zelinsky, C., ed. (in press) The Semantics of prepositions in natural language processing. Berlin; Mouton de Gruyter.
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© 1992 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Brée, D.S. (1992). Words for Time. In: Macar, F., Pouthas, V., Friedman, W.J. (eds) Time, Action and Cognition. NATO ASI Series, vol 66. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-3536-0_34
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-3536-0_34
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
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