Semantic Analysis and Contextual Harmony of Durations

Temporal relations, such duration, aspect, frequency, time point and sequence as expressions, describe the relationships between temporal elements and events in complex knowledge networks. Logical compatibility between temporal elements and different types of events has a strong influence on the semantic interpretation and grammaticality of sentences. It is one of the most complicated, frequently used, but least understood concepts in linguistics. In this paper, we focus on durations, and show that syntactic structures (construction patterns) make fine-grained distinctions between durations. We also explain their common functionalities and differences based on semantic harmony. In addition, we show that the usage of durations is affected primarily by their constructional meanings and the types of collocated events; and constructional meaning of durations is main factor which affect the usage of durations. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the morpho-syntactic structure of durations also reduces the flexibility of their usage. We list four types of morpho-syntactic structures of duration expressions, and discuss the constraints on their usage. Based on our observations, we conclude that the properness of a sentence depends on an ordering of the lexical words such that the semantics, syntax, and morphology of the sentence are in harmony.