Temporal Coherence

Mental Time Travel and Time Reference Difficulties in Alzheimer’s Disease: Are They Related? A Systematic Review

“…From a linguistic perspective, time reference concerns three main categories: tense and grammatical aspect (which are grammatical categories), and lexical aspect (a lexical category). These categories are essential to organize the localization of events on the timeline ( Grisot, 2018 ), indicating when and how the events took place. While tense refers to when the event took place (i.e., before, at the same time, or after the time of speech, referring, respectively, to a past, present, or future event; Reichenbach, 1947 ), aspect indicates how the event took place.…”

“…Grammatical aspect is also expressed by inflectional morphemes bound to verbs (e.g., walk ed perfective vs. was walk ing imperfective ) and perfective or imperfective adverbials (e.g., last Monday vs. every Monday; Vetters, 1996 ; Grisot, 2018 ). Another linguistic device to convey aspect is lexical aspect, which refers to the temporal profile of the internal course of an event ( Vetters, 1996 ; Grisot, 2018 ). It is related to verb semantics and to their argument structure, independent of marking for tense and grammatical aspect.…”

“…It is related to verb semantics and to their argument structure, independent of marking for tense and grammatical aspect. For instance, following classification of Vendler (1957 , 1967) , verbs can be categorized as an activity, an achievement, an accomplishment, or a state depending on the use of the verb (e.g., “run” is an activity but “run a mile” is an accomplishment, depending on whether the final boundary of the situation—its end—is expressed or not; see Grisot, 2018 for more details about the differences between the four classes of lexical aspect in English and in French). Analyzing the use of morphological marking of tense and grammatical aspect on inflected verbs, classes of verbs (i.e., lexical aspect), and temporal adverbials in language production and comprehension could then be an effective way of assessing time processing abilities.…”