A Pragmatic Model of Temporal Cohesive Ties

This chapter comprises four main sections and ends with a summary. First, it puts forward the HD model, which is an innovative model of temporal reference distinguishing between the temporal information from Tense, Aktionsart, Aspect, Mood, temporal adverbials, temporal connectives, aspectual markers and markedness, among others. Second, it develops a mixed conceptual-procedural account of Tense, by specifying that the notion of context, referred to as ConText, is understood as a cognitive construct consisting of a set of assumptions selected during the interpretation process, rather than determined in advance and expanded during the interpretation process when the expectation of relevance is satisfied or abandoned. In the ConText, the comprehender inferentially constructs the conceptual content of Tense and Aktionsart, and makes use of the procedural information encoded by Tense and Aspect in order to manipulate the conceptual representations built. Third, it revisits the verbal tenses investigated in this book according to the HD model.