We consider a logicist approach to natural language understanding based on the translation of a quasi-logical form into a temporal logic, explicitly constructed for the representation of action and change, and the subsequent reasoning about this semantic structure in the context of a background knowledge theory using automated theorem proving techniques. The approach is substantiated through a proof-of-concept question answering system implementation that uses a head-driven phrase structure grammar developed in the Linguistic Knowledge Builder to construct minimal recursion semantics structures which are translated into a Temporal Action Logic where both the SNARK automated theorem prover and the Allegro Prolog logic programming environment can be used for reasoning through an interchangeable compilation into first-order logic or logic programs respectively.