An Empirical Study on Vague Deictic Temporal Adverbials

Svenja Kenneweg, Brendan Balcerak Jackson, Joerg Deigmoeller, Julian Eggert, Philipp Cimiano


Abstract
Temporal adverbial phrases such as recently and some time ago have a special function in communication and temporal cognition. These adverbials are deictic, in that their meaning is tied to their time of utterance; and they are vague, in that the time periods to which they apply are under-specified in comparison to expressions such as yesterday, which precisely indicates the day before the day of utterance. Despite their vagueness, conversational participants have a mental image of when events described using these adverbials take place. We present a study that aims to quantify this mental model in terms of fuzzy or graded membership. To achieve this, we investigated the four English temporal adverbials recently, just, some time ago and long time ago as applied to types of events with different durations and frequencies, by conducting surveys to measure how speakers judge the different adverbials to apply in different time ranges. Our results suggest that it is possible to represent the meanings of deictic vague temporal adverbials geometrically in terms of graded membership within a temporal conceptual space.
Anthology ID:
2024.cogalex-1.3
Volume:
Proceedings of the Workshop on Cognitive Aspects of the Lexicon @ LREC-COLING 2024
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Michael Zock, Emmanuele Chersoni, Yu-Yin Hsu, Simon de Deyne
Venue:
CogALex
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
26–31
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.cogalex-1.3
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Svenja Kenneweg, Brendan Balcerak Jackson, Joerg Deigmoeller, Julian Eggert, and Philipp Cimiano. 2024. An Empirical Study on Vague Deictic Temporal Adverbials. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Cognitive Aspects of the Lexicon @ LREC-COLING 2024, pages 26–31, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
An Empirical Study on Vague Deictic Temporal Adverbials (Kenneweg et al., CogALex 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.cogalex-1.3.pdf