6. Modelling temporal reasoning

The interaction of determiners with aspectual adverbs is subject to interesting constraints to structure information. This chapter presents an investigation based only on English data to clarify the logical properties of these constraints and study their effects in temporal reasoning, as a modus of indexical inference at the level of information structure. The interaction is analysed of determiners, interpreted as relations between subsets of the domain, and the dynamic DRT semantics of aspectual adverbs of Smessaert &and ter Meulen (2004). Temporal reasoning with aspectual adverbs constitutes a form of dynamic indexical inference. The causal interpretation of temporal information requires a partitioning of information structure into focus and common ground, not unlike what is known in quantifier theory.