NooJ local grammars and cognitive small worlds:

Abstract

Over the course of centuries, time has been and still is one of the concepts men have been long investigating, more specifically, the way in which time, in its flow, can be objectively managed and coped with. Scientists, philosophers, writers and artists have tried and still try to make their contribution to the conceptual definition of time, however discovering that it constantly seems to escape any form of definitive and immutable indication, especially as regards the classic tripartite but elusive subdivision of time conceived as past, present and future. Consequently, the postulations regarding the concept of time have produced innumerable and extremely varied statements. To name just two of them, only apparently dissimilar, we will recall Albert Einstein’s "Time is relative, its only value is given by what we do while it is passing" and Marcel Proust’s "The days are perhaps the same for a watch, but not for a man." The attempt to “dominate” time and its continuous and uninterrupted flow is present also in the morphosyntactic structures of natural languages, including Italian. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to assess how date and duration expressions are morphosyntactically built and can be formalised by means of specific NooJ local grammars, finite-state automata (FSA) and graphs.