Temporal constraints and their interpretations in natural language

A series of extensions of tense theory of atomic events to accommodate durative events is presented. The interaction of tenses with time adverbials is discussed and a constraint for tense-adverb agreement is proposed. Sentences containing clauses connected by a temporal connective, such as `when´, `before´, `after´, etc. may have different aspect interpretations, depending on the situation types and verb forms involved. In particular, `before´ and `after´ are not always inverses of each other. One can adopt a similar mechanism to take account of this kind of sentence. Their temporal constraints are described, and their temporal interpretations can be obtained accurately