Patrick Caudal

French National Centre for Scientific Research | CNRS · Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle

Many so-called ‘zero tense’-marked (which we define as morphologically reduced and underspecified inflections) or untensed verb forms found in tenseless languages, have been characterized as context dependent for their temporal and aspectual interpretation, with the verb’s aspectual content (either as event structure or viewpoint properties) being...

So-called ‘zero’ or ‘null’ tenses have often been characterized as functionally deficient forms, deprived of any inherent content. In this paper, we will focus on the semantics of a morpho-phonologically null inflectional verbal paradigm in Anindilyakwa (Groote Eylandt, N.T., Australia, which is both temporally and aspectually underspecified. Throu...

This paper investigates the meaning of a specific intonation contour found in the Northern Australian language Iwaidja called Linear Lengthening Intonation (LLI). Using an experimental field work approach, we analysed approximately 4,000 utterances. We demonstrate that the semantics of LLI is broadly event-quantificational as well as temporally sca...

This paper investigates the diachronic evolution of so-called aspectual coercion (de Swart 1998, Bary & Egg 2012) in French, with respect to two major tenses, namely the simple past (passé simple) (PS) and compound past (passé composé) (PC); it will more specifically bear on cases of inchoative readings. Throughout a study spanning several diachron...

Towards a constructional account of structures in the conditionnel This paper will put forth an innovative research program on the French conditionnel, backing it with some relatively detailed empirical arguments. The research hypothesis here advanced can be described as constructionalist in the broadest sense (and not simply in the sense of Goldbe...

Mari Alda , Modalités et temps: Des modèles aux données. (Sciences pour la communication, 109.) Bern: Peter Lang, 2015, xii + 249 pp. 978 3 0343 1383 4 (broché), 978 3 0351 9866 9 (EPUB), 978 3 0352 0280 9 (PDF) - Volume 27 Issue 3 - Patrick Caudal

The Minimalist Program of Generative Grammar provides a model of the Sentence which represents the competence of the native speaker. The model combines lexical and morphosyntactic primitives via iterative merge operations. No comparable model exists for discourse; nor can one exist, since the primitive sentences of a discourse are unlimited in thei...

Proceedings of the Twenty-Sixth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session and Parasession on Aspect (2000)

This article, which explores the pragmatics of tense and aspect, focusing on the interrelation and boundary between semantics and pragmatics, addresses two questions involving the semantics/pragmatics interface: What part of the interpretative content ascribed to tense/aspect forms should pertain to pragmatics, as opposed to semantics? How do seman...

Relations between tense, aspect, modality and evidentiality in the French system The present paper will first aim at clarifying how aspectuo-temporal meaning can constraint and determine modal judgments originating in different kinds of expressions in French (conditional structures, modal verbs, tenses). So-called conjecture uses of the French futu...

Patrick Caudal, Relations between tense, aspect, modality and evidentiality in the French system The present paper will first aim at clarifying how aspectuo-temporal meaning can constraint and determine modal judgments originating in different kinds of expressions in French (conditional structures, modal verbs, tenses). So-called conjecture uses of...

This paper is an overview of the tense, aspect and modality (TAM) system in Murrinh-Patha, a polysynthetic language of the Daly River region of northern Australia. Our aim is to provide a detailed account of the range of TAM categories and their uses, highlighting along the way areas of interest for theoretical semantic analysis. We build here on e...

The clitic -rru in Panyjima, glossed as ‘now’ by Dench, appears not only in present tense but also in past and future clauses. This paper analyses the uses of this clitic and its interactions with tenses at clause level, as well as its role in the wider discourse context. We argue that -rru has temporal and contrastive properties, more specifically...

In this paper we propose a semantic type-driven account of verb-formation patterns in Panyjima. By offering an explicit theory for the construal of semantically simplex event descriptions from morphologically complex verbal stems, we flesh out intuitions dating back to Clark and Clark (1979) about the role of derivational morphology in the interpre...

The article discusses a novel kind of aspectuo-temporal approach to the semantics of conditionals, with the use of French data. A probable connection between tense-aspect marking and the interpretation of conditional structures (CS), including their protases has been discussed, resulting in the emergence of a consensus that past imperfective marker...

Le système verbal du français contemporain résulte d’une évolution séculaire et l’examen diachronique des valeurs de chacune des formes contribue à la compréhension de la sémantique verbale contemporaine. Parallèlement, l’étude diachronique du système verbal français ne peut se dispenser d’examiner la répartition des valeurs sémantiques sur les for...

We propose here a treatment of the Alemannic Perfekt, a preterit-like tense, in which,rhetorical relations eliminate unwanted readings ,among ,those produced ,by an underspecified semantic representation. It illustrates how semantic underspecification can,be reduced at the semantics/pragmatics interface within the SDRT framework. 1. Introducing asp...

In this paper, we investigate how certain types of predicates should be connected with certain types of degree scales, and how this can affect the events they describe. The distribution and interpretation of various degree adverbials will serve us as a guideline in this perspective. They suggest that two main types of degree scales should be distin...

This paper aims at proposing a detailed account of the semantics and pragmatics of perfects (and in particular of the French passé composé) within the SDRT framework. We take this framework to be the ideal candidate for dealing with such issues resorting to the semantics/pragmatics interface. We will try and substantiate the idea that tenses are as...

The goal of this paper is to provide a unified account of the different interpretations of the French imparfait. Capitalizing on the idea put forth in Caudal & Roussarie (2002a) that tenses should be viewed as illocutionary functions ('illocutionary viewpoints') because their aspectual, temporal and modal content reflect the speaker's attitude towa...

Patrick Caudal, Carl Vetters et Laurent Roussarie : Treating the French Imparfait as an inconsequent tense The goal of this paper is to provide a unified account of the different interpretations of the French imparfait. Capitalizing on the idea put forth in Caudal & Roussarie (2002a) that tenses should be viewed as illocutionary functions ('illocut...

The goal of this paper is to provide a unified account of the different interpretations of the French imparfait. Capitalizing on the idea put forth in Caudal & Roussarie (2002a) that tenses should be viewed as illoculionary functions ('illocutionary viewpoints') because their aspectual, temporal and modal content reflect the speaker's attitude towa...

this paper, he has greatly influenced it in the course of a long collaboration. Errors or misconceptions, however; remain ours

The distinction between achievements and accomplishments is known to be an empirically important but subtle one. It is argued here to depend on the atomicity (rather than punctuality) of events, and to be strongly related to incrementality (i.e., to event-object mapping functions). A computational treatment of incrementality and atomicity is discus...

This paper proposes a formal treatment of collective nouns (e.g. police, orchestra, and forest) drawing on the rich lexical typing of the Generative Lexicon. Collectives can be alternatively interpreted as collections (in the sense of Link, 1983 [9]) or as individuals, depending on contextual factors. They are therefore polysemous. Their semantics...

Achievements and accomplishments are argued in this paper to differ w.r.t. atomicity (rather than punctuality), a notion strongly but not exclusively related to incrementality, i.e., to eventobject mapping functions ; the latter will be shown to be unsufficient to account for certain cases of non-atomicity. A computational treatment of incrementali...

I will argue in this paper that the standard notions of affectedness, change-of-state and result state are too coarse-grained, and will revise and enrich substantially their content, increasing their role in a compositional aspect construal procedure. I will claim in particular that a proper theory of event structure requires that enriched result s...

this paper. It will be established that those two languages exhibit substantial differences in the way they address resultative meanings, respectively through the pass compos (PC, henceforth) and the perfect (PF, henceforth). A notion abstracting away from the ontological and purely mereological view on situation structures, phasal structure, will...

Introduction v Currently dominant neo-davidsonian view on aspect calculus has driven many to study event structure in terms of mereological, part-of relationships ; it will be argued here that this approach is not appropriate for theoretical & empirical reasons (cf. Asher (1993) & Verkuyl (1993) for related positions, on philosophical grounds); v A...

This paper proposes a formal treatment of collective nouns (e.g. police, orchestra, and forest) drawing on the rich lexical typing of the Generative Lexicon. Collectives can be alternatively interpreted as collections in the sense of Link (1983), or as individuals, depending on contextual factors. They are therefore polysemous. Their semantics incl...

Résumé – Abstract Le but de cet article est double : (i) expliquer certaines observations trans-linguistiques à propos de la sémantique et de la pragmatique des parfaits, notamment quant au rôle joué par la notion de résultat(ivité), par opposition à celle de transition(alité) ; (ii) défendre l'idée qu'un traitement formel approprié des parfaits da...

We propose here a treatment of the Alemannic Perfekt, a preterit-like tense, in which rhetorical relations eliminate unwanted readings among those produced by an underspecified semantic representation. It illustrates how semantic underspecification can be reduced at the semantics/pragmatics interface within the SDRT framework. 1. Introducing aspect...