The English past tense as a definite description

What it is about

The question is what the English simple past means. Two analyses dominate: an existential reading with domain restriction, and a pronominal (anaphoric) reading in which the past tense needs an antecedent. The paper shows a group of data neither analysis handles: the simple past is obligatory, not the present perfect, even with no antecedent in the context. Its example is pointing at a church and asking "Who built this church?", where only "built" is allowed. The author proposes that the English past is lexically ambiguous between an anaphoric reading and a uniqueness reading, parallel to the ambiguity of definite articles. The argument is built from tests: a lexical-ambiguity test, a conjunction test, an ellipsis test and a contradiction test, plus projection tests of the uniqueness presupposition, using events with perceivable change of state, events assumed to have taken place, and lifetimes as reference times. The paper reports no numerical results; its evidence is judgements about example sentences.

Ideas

• I1. world/src/narr.rs and world/src/qud.rs: when a past-tense event has no earlier antecedent, let it resolve to a unique event in the world store, following the uniqueness reading. Where no such event exists, flag the sentence instead of guessing. Measure how often the resolution is correct on the story world.
• I2. Turn the four tests into item sets with a felicity label, for example conjunction and ellipsis after an unanchored past. Build them from templates, not from a model, and use them as a held-out test of the tense rules.
• I3. Negative control: pairs such as "built" against "has built" with a pointing context must come out differently. A rule that treats both the same fails this check.

For Mova

The chapters are 13. Verbs (tense) and 35. Reference and coreference (definiteness and anaphora). The code is world/src/narr.rs, world/src/qud.rs and the sieve in coref/src/sieve.rs, which handles antecedents. The measures: the resolution accuracy on the story world, and the pass rate of the minimal-pair item set. The paper's theory is not yet tested in any Mova data; its tests are the part that can be written down as rules.

Topics: Coreference resolution

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.16995/glossa.5699

@article{zhao2023english,
  title = {{The English past tense as a definite description}},
  author = {Zhao, Ruoying},
  journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics},
  year = {2023},
  doi = {10.16995/glossa.5699},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.5699}
}

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