Situations Tense & Aspect

In this book the author investigates identity conditions for situations in discourse. In discourse, situations can be referents of pronouns. The question which then arises is where and how these referents have been introduced and how they can stay the same under growing information within a discourse. The first part of the book argues that situations are intensional rather than extensional entities. The author treats situations as intensional entities introduced within a discourse by specifying place and time. In the development of her argument she refers to the question of how roles and institutions, represented by individuals and situations, are treated semantically and whether they need to be part of the text ontology. The second and third parts of the book contain an application of the philosophical foundations provided in Part One to the semantics of tense and aspect in interaction with the 'Aktionsart' of situations which specify expressions. Basic insights of Discourse Representation Theory are combined with a head-driven, flexible categorial grammar.