Tense, Grammatical Aspect and Subjectivity: An Experimental Study Using Inter-Annotator Agreement Rates and Corpus-Based Data

Abstract

In this paper, I investigate experimentally the question of subjectivity and its supposed triggering by the categories of tense and grammatical aspect. The study is carried out in the relevance theoretic pragmatic framework, which assumes that certain linguistic expressions encode procedural information constraining the determination of the explicit content of an utterance (that is, the explicature), and of the implicatures (that is, implicit premises and implicit conclusions). In the current state of the art, the notion of subjectivity, which roughly means the expression of a point of view or perspective, has been correlated to a series of linguistic expressions, such as deictic elements (personal, spatial, temporal), grammatical aspect and connectives. Here, I examine the relation between subjectivity and two parameters of temporal reference: verbal tenses and grammatical aspect. Annotation experiments were carried out on corpus data in English, French and Serbian in order to test whether native speakers are able to consciously identify and evaluate information about subjectivity in corpus data. Based on the results of these experiments and using the notion of (specific) procedural versus general (pragmatic) inference, I discuss the status of subjectivity as semantic (encoded procedural information) or pragmatic (general inferential) information, and give evidence in favour of the latter.