Tense, Aspect and the Semantics of Event Description | Towards a Contrastive Analysis of Italian and Japanese

Patrizia Zotti

ISBN 10: 3659154725 / ISBN 13: 9783659154720

Published by LAP Lambert Academic Publishing, 2012

About this Item

Tense, Aspect and the Semantics of Event Description | Towards a Contrastive Analysis of Italian and Japanese | Patrizia Zotti | Taschenbuch | Englisch | LAP Lambert Academic Publishing | EAN 9783659154720 | Verantwortliche Person für die EU: preigu GmbH & Co. KG, Lengericher Landstr. 19, 49078 Osnabrück, mail[at]preigu[dot]de | Anbieter: preigu.

Seller Inventory # 106391912

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Tense, Aspect and the Semantics of Event Description | Towards a Contrastive Analysis of Italian and Japanese
• Publisher: LAP Lambert Academic Publishing
• Publication Date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 3659154725
• ISBN 13: 9783659154720
• Binding: Taschenbuch
• Condition: Neu
• Dimensions: 220W x 152H x 15D millimeters 220 millimeters width by 152 millimeters height by 15 millimeters depth
• Weight: 379 grams
• Seller catalogs:
  • Bücher

About this title

Synopsis

Temporal analysis of events is an important part of many natural language processing tasks. We expect events to contain the same temporal information regardless of the language, however, the way temporal information is encoded via lexical or grammatical properties differs from language to language. While the lexical aspect of event semantics is relatively similar across languages, the grammatical aspect varies greatly, and concepts of tense and aspect may not be shared across languages, preventing a simple correspondence of verbal forms between two languages from being established. This work represents a first theoretical and empirical contrastive investigation on how temporal information is conveyed in Japanese and Italian with a focus on the semantics of events and how they are reported. We include a classification of eventuality types and their expression in tense and aspect, making this work useful for researchers working on tasks that require detailed, cross-lingual temporal analysis. We empirically support our theoretical proposal by building and semi-automatically annotating a parallel Japanese-Italian corpus with temporality tags.

About the Author

Patrizia Zotti received a Ph.D. in linguistics from Università degli Studi di Napoli "L'Orientale" in 2011. From 2008 to 2010 she was visiting researcher at the NLP Lab of the Nara Institute of Science and Technology, and at the Italian School of East Asian Studies in Kyoto. Most of her research centers on event semantics and corpus linguistics.