An Approach to the Representation of Iterative Situations

Natural Language

Volume

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 10

Natural Language: Intepretation

Iterative sentences such as Mary knocked on the door four times, John played the sonata every other day, and Mary was often busy can be understood as asserting that some situation type is either repeated a certain number of times or with a certain frequency. The semantic content of iterative sentences has been standardly represented by some logical formula which quantifies over instances of a non-iterative situation type. The principal claim of this paper, and the basis of the representations proposed in it, is that we also require iterative situation types and instances in order to completely handle the range of possible interpretations of iterative sentences.