This open access book provides new methodological and theoretical insights into temporal
reference and its linguistic expression from a cross-linguistic experimental corpus pragmatics
approach. Verbal tenses in general and more specifically the categories of tense grammatical
and lexical aspect are treated as cohesion ties contributing to the temporal coherence of a
discourse as well as to the cognitive temporal coherence of the mental representations built
in the language comprehension process. As such it investigates the phenomenon of temporal
reference at the interface between corpus linguistics theoretical linguistics and pragmatics
experimental pragmatics psycholinguistics natural language processing and machine
translation.
