News & Events

Language Information Sciences Research Centre & Department of Chinese, Translation & Linguistics Joint Seminar Mini-Grammars for Time Adverbials In English By Professor Charles J. Fillmore International Computer Science Institute University of California, Berkeley Time: 4:30 - 6:00 pm Date: Monday, 05 February 2001 Venue: CTL Conference Room B7533, CityU Abstract There are numerous mysteries and irregularities in the form and distribution of temporal adverbial expressions in English. In this paper I will try to show the possibility of developing two families of grammatical constructions (using the Construction Grammar framework) that will cover a large number of such expressions. The semantic task of one of these construction types is to situate a time with respect to some other temporal reference point; this construction will turn out to be an instance of a much more general pattern, not restricted to time. The semantic task of the second of these types is to situate a time with respect to some temporal units of the kind determined by clocks and calendars; these closely related constructions appear to be unique to the time domain. Charles J. Fillmore, Professor in the Graduate School, University of California, Berkeley, received his Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Michigan in 1960 and had spent 5 years before that in Japan. He taught linguistics for 10 years at the Ohio State University before joining Berkeley's Department of Linguistics in 1971. His research has concentrated mainly on questions of syntax and lexical semantics, and has emphasized the relationship between properties of linguistic form and matters of meaning and use. He collaborated with Paul Kay on a monograph on construction grammar, and has directed a research project to offer syntactically and lexically analyzed and translated Japanese texts on the Internet. He is now actively engaged in a project under NSF in computational lexicography, FrameNet, the fruit of which is a lexicon with word senses represented by semantic frames. (For details of FrameNet, please see http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/~framenet/). Prof. Fillmore was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (Stanford University) during 1970-71. He became a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1984 and the president of the Linguistic Society of America in 1990. He was honored by the University of Chicago with a Doctorate of Humane Letters in 2000. Enquiries: 2788-8705 ___________________ All are welcome ____________________