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Mariana's PhD thesis appeared as a book in 1999. It is entitled:
Tense
and Aspect in Discourse: A study of the interaction between aspect, discourse relations and temporal reference within discourse
representation theory with special attention to Bulgarian
ISBN 954-9908-01-1
 For more information please contact Mariana.
Abstract:
| | This study is a PhD thesis from the Institute for Computational Linguistics, University
of Stuttgart, Germany. It deals with the theoretical notion of aspect and the ways aspect is referred to in languages with
different structure and devices to convey aspectual information. Aspect, along with tense and temporal expressions and clauses,
reveals information about the temporal structure of texts. But it also has a part in shaping their rhetorical structure. Evidence
from French, English, German, Bulgarian are studied, and it is shown that Bulgarian provides explicit language means to describe
the semantic effects of aspect which are partially present in the three other discussed languages. The dynamic analysis of
tense and aspect pursues the methodological headlines of Discourse Representation Theory ([KAMP,79,81;&al.,93]). A deeper
look at Bulgarian language phenomena provides arguments for a new way of defining and formally representing the overall realm
of aspect in a uniform way. The introduced method is based on combining the lexical semantic effects of the rich derivational
mechanisms in Bulgarian with the meaning of the aspect related specific Bulgarian morphological category 'wid'. It
results in elaborating a formal metalanguage, which allows accounting for the discourse semantics and rhetoric effects of
aspect. In consequence the Bulgarian past tenses 'aorist' and 'imperfect' are discussed. Their interpretation
and semantic representation are included into the developed formal account. Finally, a semantic construction algorithm, which
ensures the explicit connection between syntactic structures and semantic representations is presented. Thus, the thesis offers
a global account for treating Bulgarian aspect with respect to discourse relations and temporal reference in texts. It claims
that the developed theoretical and formal apparatus is general enough to be valid and successfully applicable across languages.
It can be incorporated into computer systems for processing of natural language texts.
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