ABSTRACT
Temporal information is pervasive in language. All sentences contain absolute or relative information about the time course of events described in those sentences (Ter Meulen, 1995; Zwaan & Radvansky, 1998). For example, in English there are 12 different categories in the tense-aspect system: past, present, and future tenses combined with the simple, perfect, progressive, and perfect-progressive aspectual forms (Celce-Murcia & Larsen-Freeman, 1999). The regularity of such temporal markers underscores the importance of time information in building coherent situation models (Magliano & Schleich, 2000; Radvansky, Zwaan, Federico, & Franklin, 1998; Rinck, Hahnel, & Becker, 2001; Zwaan, 1996).
