Abstract:The main goal of this paper is to discuss the temporal behaviour of European Portuguese factive purpose clauses introduced by para ('to') + non-inflected Infinitives. We will argue that a posteriority temporal relation, resulting from the interaction between the lexical properties of the connective and the Result Rhetorical Relation, is crucial to understand the temporal possibilities displayed in these sentences. However, we will demonstrate that other semantic factors, such as the aspectual profile of the eventualities and the Rhetorical Relations that may arise in these constructions, also play a decisive role in determining the final temporal ordering of the clauses.Keywords: purpose clauses, temporal relations, aspect, rhetorical relations Palavras-chave: orações finais, relações temporais, aspeto, relações retóricas IntroduçãoAs interdependências de natureza semântica que se estabelecem entre a oração principal e a subordinada no contexto de adverbiais finais colocam-nos problemas de inegável interesse e pertinência. Uma das questões que não têm sido objeto de um estudo sistemático em Português Europeu (PE, doravante) relaciona-se com o tipo de relações temporais entre as situações representadas neste género de estruturas.

Narratives are present in many forms of human expression and can be understood as a fundamental way of communication between people. Computational understanding of the underlying story of a narrative, however, may be a rather complex task for both linguists and computational linguistics. Such task can be approached using natural language processing techniques to automatically extract narratives from texts. In this paper, we present an in depth survey of narrative extraction from text, providing a establishing a basis/framework for the study roadmap to the study of this area as a whole as a means to consolidate a view on this line of research. We aim to fulfill the current gap by identifying important research efforts at the crossroad between linguists and computer scientists. In particular, we highlight the importance and complexity of the annotation process, as a crucial step for the training stage. Next, we detail methods and approaches regarding the identification and extraction of narrative components, their linkage and understanding of likely inherent relationships, before detailing formal narrative representation structures as an intermediate step for visualization and data exploration purposes. We then move into the narrative evaluation task aspects, and conclude this survey by highlighting important open issues under the domain of narratives extraction from texts that are yet to be explored.

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In this paper we investigate the temporal and rhetorical relations in complex sentences with clauses introduced by quando ‘when’ in European Portuguese. We put forward a proposal for a semantic treatment within a theoretical framework which is grounded in Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT; Asher and Lascarides 2003), with some extra stipulations to deal with specificities of complex sentences related to: (i) the directionality of rhetorical and temporal relations; (ii) the fronted or final position of the adverbial clause and its implications for text-structuring rhetorical relations. We show that the directionality of both the temporal and rhetorical relations is from the main situation to the subordinate situation, regardless of the order of the discourse. We argue that each complex sentence with a clause introduced by quando describes situations that are connected by rhetorical relations at two distinct levels: at the level of content and at the level of text-structuring. At the level of content, we resort to SDRT’s list of rhetorical relations. As for the text-structuring relations, we propose two new relations: Frame and Specification. Finally, we compare the complex sentences with their non-complex counterparts to demonstrate that the rhetorical mechanisms used in both types of discourse are not always the same. To sum up, the investigation carried out allows us to conclude that an analysis which takes into account the temporal and rhetorical relations leads to a better semantic and discursive understanding of complex sentences with clauses introduced by quando.

In this paper, we put forward a semantic analysis of constructions of prepositional phrases introduced by the preposition para with a locative meaning combined with the verbs ser, estar and ficar. In this proposal, we characterise these constructions regarding the properties individual-level/ stage-level, modal reading, and vagueness of the location, as well as restrictions imposed on the subject related to some lexical semantic features, in particular [movable] and [animated] features. Additionally, we contrast these constructions to the ones introduced by the preposition em (typically locative), revealing to what extent they differ from each other.