@inproceedings {pub5628,
	title = {An Empirical Study on Vague Deictic Temporal Adverbials},
	author = {Svenja Kenneweg AND J{\"o}rg Deigm{\"o}ller AND Philipp Cimiano AND Julian Eggert},
	year = {2024},
	month = {May},
	abstract = {Temporal adverbial phrases such as recently and some time ago have a special function in communication and
temporal cognition. These adverbials are deictic, in that their meaning is tied to their time of utterance; and they
are vague, in that the time periods to which they apply are under-specified in comparison to expressions such as
yesterday, which precisely indicates the day before the day of utterance. Despite their vagueness, conversational
participants have a mental image of when events described using these adverbials take place. Our study aims
to quantify this mental model in terms of fuzzy or graded membership. To achieve this, we investigated the
four English temporal adverbials recently, just, some time ago and long time ago as applied to types of events
with different durations and frequencies, by conducting surveys to measure how speakers judge the different
adverbials to apply in different time ranges. Our results suggest that it is possible to represent the meanings of
deictic vague temporal adverbials geometrically in terms of graded membership within a temporal conceptual space.},
	publisher = {ACM},
	booktitle = {Cognitive Aspects of the Lexicon}
}