Notes on tense interpretation

Embedded tenses pose a challenge to any semantic theory of temporal discourse. In this paper I propose an intensional account of English embedded tenses. On the account that I will present, the semantic job of a tense is to specify a relation between a perspective time and the time at which an eventuality takes place. By default, the time of utterance is the perspective time that a tense takes as input. But a switch of perspective time can be triggered when a tense appears in certain grammatical environments. I suggest that intensional verbs and modals are triggers of perspective-time shifts.

Proceedings of the 26th annual meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics -, 1988

An analysis of English tense and aspect is presented that specifies temporal precedence relations within a sentence. The relevant reference points for interpretation are taken to be the initial and terminal points of events in the world, as well as two "hypothetical" times: the perfect time (when a sentence contains perfect aspect) and the progressive or during time. A method for providing temporal interpretation for nontensed elements in the sentence is also described.

American Journal of Germanic Linguistics and Literatures, 1999

The theoretical aim of this book, indicated by its subtitle, is to elucidate the interface between semantic interpretation and morphosyntactic structure. Its empirical domain, indicated by the title, would appear to be ideally suited to this goal. Tense and aspect are well-studied semantic categories, but ones in which there are still plenty of puzzles. It is reasonable to think that an improved understanding may come about through detailed study of the

Journal of Semantics, 2019

In this paper, we investigate the temporal interpretation of propositional attitude complement clauses in four typologically unrelated languages: Washo (language isolate), Medumba (Niger-Congo), Hausa (Afro-Asiatic), and Samoan (Austronesian). Of these languages, Washo and Medumba are optional-tense languages, while Hausa and Samoan are tenseless. Just like in obligatory-tense languages, we observe variation among these languages when it comes to the availability of so-called simultaneous and backward-shifted readings of complement clauses. For our optional-tense languages, we argue that a Sequence of Tense parameter is active in these languages, just as in obligatory-tense languages. However, for completely tenseless clauses, we need something more. We argue that there is variation in the degree to which languages make recourse to res-movement, or a similar mechanism that manipulates LF structures to derive backward-shifted readings in tenseless complement clauses. We additionally appeal to cross-linguistic variation in the lexical semantics of perfective aspect to derive or block certain readings. The result is that the typological classification of a language as tensed, optionally tensed, or tenseless, does not alone determine the temporal interpretation possibilities for complement clauses. Rather, structural parameters of variation cross-cut these broad classes of languages to deliver the observed cross-linguistic picture.

2000

Combining ideas from Donald Davidson, Hans Reichenbach and Discourse Representation Theory (DRT), I will develop a constraint-based semantics for the Dutch tenses and temporal auxiliaries which is fully integrated in the HPSG framework. The semantics will be inspired to a large extent by DRT, but the syntax is squarely based on the lexicialist surface-oriented approach of HPSG, and so is the treatment of the relation between syntax and semantics. Instead of DRT's construction rules which map syntactic structures onto discourse representation structures, I will use lexically anchored constraints on the relation between syntactic, semantic and pragmatic properties of signs. Since the constraints which I will use are monotonic, the resulting treatment is non-directional, in contrast to DRT's construction rules, which are unidirectional (from syntax to semantics) and irreversible. Next to this technical advantage, there is also a conceptual one: since the construction rules of DRT have the unlimited power which was once characteristic of transformations in the Standard Theory, they allow for such a broad range of stipulations and arbitrarily complex conditions that the linguist is not encouraged to strive for maximum transparency in the formulation of relations between syntax and semantics/pragmatics. The constraint-based approach, on the other hand, imposes a much tighter discipline on the formulation of such relations, and thus enhances the possibility of arriving at computationally viable analyses.