Processing of Tense

A study of the processing of tense, more specifically the English past tense. Against a theoretical background, this book presents a number of psycholinguistic studies, examining how and when the language processor assigns an interpretation to tense morphology. It looks at several specific topics: temporal anaphora resolution, adverb preposing and discourse relations, and the sequence of tense ambiguity. The picture that emerges is one in which the processor is not guided by the preceding context in making interpretive decisions regarding tense, as previous work has suggested. Rather, sentence-level linguistic structure appears to cue the processor in deciding which of the multiple possible interpretations to assign to a past-tense marker. This book also offers theoretical perspectives on issues of both linguistic (temporal adverbs, sentence and discourse level temporal interpretation) and psycholinguistic (models of semantic processing) interest. This work should be of interest to graduate students and researchers in linguistics and psycholinguistics working on semantic processing, temporal interpretation and discourse processing.