Annotation of causal and aspectual structure of events in RED: a preliminary report

Abstract

Causal and temporal relations among events are typically analyzed in terms of interclausal relations. Yet participants in a monoclausal event interact causally as well, and monoclausal events unfold in temporal phases. We propose an annotation scheme for the resulting analysis of event structure types. The annotation scheme is based on a fine-grained analysis of aspectual structure combined with a novel analysis of physical event types based on proposals in the theoretical linguistics literature. By decomposing complex events in a clause, we will ultimately model the overall dynamic causal network of entities interacting over time described in a text.