Lascarides, A. [1992] Knowledge, Causality and Temporal Representation, Linguistics , 30(5), pp941-973, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin, New York.
In this paper, a formal semantic account of the simple past tense in text is offered. The contributions to the interpretation of text made by the text's syntactic structure, semantic content, aspectual classification, world knowledge of the causal relations between events, and Gricean pragmatic maxims are all represented within a single logical framework. This feature of the theory gives rise to solutions to several puzzles concerning the relation between the descriptive order of events in text and their temporal relations in interpretation.
@article{lascarides:1992,
author = {Alex Lascarides},
year = {1992},
title = {Knowledge, Causality and Temporal Representation},
journal = {Linguistics},
volume = {30},
number = {5},
pages = {941--973},
publisher = {Walter d Gruyter}
}