Ter Meulen points out that, though common sense reasoning plays an important role in temporal reasoning, it is not her aim to deal with it. Finally the present paperback edition of the book incorporates an appendix giving some exercises on DAT construction and a short account of the resemblance and difference between DRT and DATs. This linguistic capacity is accompanied by an inferential ability in interpretation of what is or is not the case when. Ter Meulen deals only with the simple past, the perfect, the progressive and some uses of the present, that is with tenses which indicate in which order events occur, through weak constraints on the temporal relations between events. Aspectual verbs describing the onset of an event semantically have an indefinite and existential character.
Verbs describing the middle of an event are quantificational verbs and holes.
In DAT's, events are complex objects, constituted of individuals, their relations and a positive or negative polarity. Events can be classified in similarity classes or types based on their parts. A type consists in a relation, objects and a positive or negative polarity, indicating whether the relation holds or does not hold between the objects. Types can also include parameters or indeterminate objects and can be used for any constituent apart from polarities. A given situation supports the type if it matches with its constituents.