Tense use in dialogue

Abstract

This paper reports on parallel corpus research that shows that there are differences in tense use in written texts between parts that represent dialogue, and parts that narrate the story. This calls for further study of tense use in dialogue, both in written representations, and in spoken dialogue. Yet, in the dialogue semantics literature almost no prior work exists that is devoted to tense use, neither from a formal, nor from a computational angle. We argue that this gap in dialogue research should be filled by further empirical investigation, as well as the development of computational tools for automated annotation of tense and temporal structure in dialogue. This will not only help understand how speakers track the temporal structure of dialogue, but also give theoretical linguistic literature on tense a wider empirical and computational dimension.