When Time Won’t Tell: Discourse Relations and Temporal Interpretation in Tagalog

Abstract

This paper argues that temporal interpretation in Tagalog is driven not simply by aspectual information, but also makes use of top-down discourse information. It is demonstrated here how discourse relations play a role in constraining temporal interpretation, given that Tagalog does not grammatically encode tense, which results in temporal vagueness. Using Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (Asher & Lascarides, 2003), show how temporal information of events is derived from discourse, by determining what type of discourse relation holds across two propositions. A detailed application of how this machinery works is given, explaining how world knowledge affects the temporal interpretation process.