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Sequence of Tense and Temporal De Re
... In terms of tense interpretation in subordinate clauses, one issue which has attracted the interest of researchers is the configuration in which a past (embedded) tense occurs immediately under another past tense (Ross 1967, Comrie 1985, Enç 1987, Abusch 1997, Kusumoto 1999, Ogihara 1994, Stowell 2007, Grønn and von Stechow 2010, Zagona 2013. Researchers were mostly interested in past under past constructions since the embedded past tense in certain languages such as English or Spanish is not a semantically interpretable past tense. ...
... The availability of the simultaneous reading for past-under-past is often referred in the more recent linguistic literature as SOT (Ross 1967, Ogihara 1994, Abusch 1997, Kusumoto 1989 among many others); its availability is subject to cross-linguistic variation: in some languages, it is mandatory, in others, it is optional, and in others, it does not exist at all. The languages that allow the simultaneous reading are often called SOT languages (such as English, Spanish, Italian and French), whereas languages that do not allow SOT are called non-SOT languages (such as Japanese, Bulgarian) and only allow for the backward-shifted interpretation. ...
... Researchers, including Ogihara (1994), Abusch (1997, Kusumoto (1988), and others, have focused on the availability of simultaneous reading in the past under past constructions, as already presented in chapter 1, Section 2.4. Through my analysis of Greek data, I have observed that in the discussed context both the simultaneous reading and the prior to the matrix reading occur. ...
This dissertation serves a twofold purpose: a semasio-syntactic study of the Sequence of Tense (SOT) phenomenon in Greek, focusing on the 'main clause - na subordinate clause' sequence, and a computational implementation within an LFG/XLE grammar for Greek, within the framework of Lexical Functional Grammar. SOT is examined in terms of the constraints imposed by the matrix verb on the tense of the subordinate clause and how this tense is interpreted. My primary concern revolves around identifying the available interpretations of the embedded verb and determining the factors that influence these interpretations. Since this study belongs to the field of
computational linguistics, I implemented the studied data for the SOT within an LFG/XLE grammar tailored to Greek. This grammar covers a wide array of linguistic
phenomena. Furthermore, it boasts an extensive lexicon of approximately 40,000
wordforms, designed to account for the intricate morphological patterns present in the
Greek language. For the purposes of this study, I embarked on the task of creating two
dedicated corpora, namely the 'oti corpus' and the 'na corpus'. These corpora were
designed to house syntactically and semantically annotated sequences in the form of
'main - oti subordinate clauses' and 'main - na subordinate clauses.' This endeavor
involved retrieving a 330,000-word corpus from the Hellenic National Corpus,
followed by extensive data wrangling to transform it into a linguistic resource. As a
result, this study yields a linguistic resource with the potential for reuse in future
research and analyses. Finally, I propose that the following interpretations of embedded verbs —simultaneous, prior to the matrix, posterior to the matrix verb, and doubleaccess reading—in the context of the SOT phenomenon are compositionally
determined by a combination of tense, grammatical aspect, lexical aspect, and the meaning of both the embedded and main verbs.
... Second, past-under-past relative clauses are excellent test cases for three linguistic approaches that make different predictions on how temporal inferences are drawn during sentence comprehension in general: syntax-driven accounts (cf. Abusch, 1997;Enç, 1986Enç, , 1987Ogihara, 1995Ogihara, , 1996Ogihara & Sharvit, 2012;Stowell, 2007;von Stechow & Grønn, 2013a), discourse pragmatic accounts (cf. Chierchia & McConnell-Ginet, 1990;Depraetere, 1996;Potts, 2005), and accounts rooted in non-linguistic event cognition (Carroll & von Stutterheim, 2010;Klein, 1994Klein, , 2000Klein, , 2008aKlein, , 2009von Stutterheim, Carroll, & Klein, 2003). ...
... From a syntactic perspective, it has been argued that people derive temporal relations between situation descriptions from the structural properties of a sentence (e.g., Abusch, 1997;Enç, 1986Enç, , 1987Ogihara, 1995;Ogihara, 1996;Stowell, 2007). This argument is based on the observation that understanding the syntactic structure of a sentence often determines how events, situations, properties, and states relate to each other (Rohde, Levy, & Kehler, 2011): For instance, in a sentence such as The girl fed the rabbit sitting near the mushroom, a comprehender must decide whether sitting near the mushroom is attached to the rabbit (i. ...
... e., The girl fed the sitting rabbit), the girl (i.e., The sitting girl fed the rabbit), or modifies the entire feeding event (i.e., The sitting girl fed the sitting rabbit). Syntax-driven accounts have therefore claimed that the syntactic status of different clause types corresponds to the underlying semantics of a sentence and determines how an embedded tense is related to a main clause tense (Abusch, 1997;Enç, 1986Enç, , 1987Ogihara, 1995;Ogihara, 1996;Stowell, 2007). ...
How events are ordered in time is one of the most fundamental pieces of information guiding our understanding of the world. Linguistically, this order is often not mentioned explicitly. Here, we propose that the mental construal of temporal order in language comprehension is based on event-structural properties. This prediction is based on a central distinction between states and events both in event perception and language: In perception, dynamic events are more salient than static states. In language, stative and eventive predicates also differ, both in their grammatical behavior and how they are processed. Consistent with our predictions, data from seven pre-registered video-sentence matching experiments, each conducted in English and German (total N = 674), show that people draw temporal inferences based on this difference: States precede events. Our findings not only arbitrate between different theories of temporal language comprehension; they also advance theoretical models of how two different cognitive capacities - event cognition and language - integrate to form a mental representation of time.
... Now, if 'may' means maybe will, then there are two parts to the meaning of 'may': the 'maybe' part and the 'will' part. Many linguists and philosophers say that 'will' is also a modal (see Abusch 1997;Condoravdi 2002;Kaufman 2005;Copley 2009;Klecha 2014;Cariani & Santorio 2018;Cariani 2021). Let's suppose they're right. ...
... I begin with some preliminary remarks about syntax. When it is said that 'will' is a modal, what is usually meant is that 'will' contains a modal morpheme-often called 'woll'-that it shares with 'would': 'will' is composed of 'woll' under a present tense operator ('Pres') and 'would' is composed of 'woll' under a past tense operator ('Past') (Abusch, 1997;Condoravdi, 2002). Consider (17). ...
... (For discussion of scopelessness, see Cariani and Santorio 2018;Cariani 2021.) Another account that predicts scopelessness is the extension semantics given by Abusch (1997) and Condoravdi (2002): on this account, 'woll' extends the time of evaluation into the future. Let ext(t) = {t : t ≥ t}. ...
The epistemic thesis is the thesis that a ‘might’ counterfactual like (1) has the same meaning as (2).(1) If Matt had gone to the parade, David might have gone to the parade.
(2) Maybe, if Matt had gone to the parade, David would have gone to the parade.
In this paper, I give a compositional semantics for ‘might’ counterfactuals that predicts the epistemic thesis. I offer a new theory of the counterfactual interpretation of the modal ‘might’ — the interpretation it receives in (1) — and I show that, when coupled with a plausible semantics for ‘if’ clauses, my theory validates the epistemic thesis.
... We will see that these bear a striking parallel to constraints on readings of individual pronouns in personal counteridenticals, discovered in Pearson (in prep.). These findings have consequences for our understanding of so-called de nunc attitudes-attitudes that are about the subjective 'now' of the attitude holder (Abusch 1997). They also highlight the systematic ways in which the grammar constrains pronominal interpretation. ...
... As a first step, let me introduce some assumptions about the interpretation of tense in attitude reports. Just as individual pronouns can receive de se interpretations, so can tense receive de nunc interpretations-that is, it can be interpreted as picking out the subjective 'now' of the attitude holder-the time that she takes herself to be located at (Abusch 1997). To see this, consider the following example. ...
... Note that this second route comes for free ifAbusch (1988Abusch ( , 1991Abusch ( , 1997,Ogihara (1996) and von Stechow (1995) are correct that embedded tenses can be construed de re. ...
In temporal counteridenticals like ‘Ian is imagining that it is 2030 and Sally is rich’, the subject locates themself at a time other than (what they believe to be) the current time. In such reports, tense in the embedded clause can denote the time that the attitude holder imagines herself to be located at, or the time that she believes herself to be located at. I show that these two interpretations are subject to systematic constraints. The observed pattern is parallel to that discovered in Pearson (in prep.) for personal counteridenticals, such as Lakoff’s famous Brigitte Bardot sentence. I propose an analysis of these findings that depends on two key assumptions: (1) there is a mechanism of ‘de nunc binding’ that encodes the ‘subjective now’ of the attitude holder; and (2) this mechanism is constrained by a principle of the grammar called ‘Condition CW’, originally proposed for personal counteridenticals in Pearson (in prep.). These findings support the view that attitudes de se and de nunc constitute a special class, not reducible to de re. They further suggest that there is a dedicated linguistic mechanism for encoding such attitudes that is subject to systematic grammatical constraints.
... According to one, tenses are quantifiers over times-or perhaps quantifiers over intervals (Ogihara 1996;Kusumoto 1999Kusumoto , 2005. According to the other, tenses are pronoun-like, in that they make reference to times (or intervals) (Partee 1973;Heim 1994;Abusch 1997;Kratzer 1998). For illustration purposes, we will sketch a pronominal analysis. ...
... See Enç (1986),Heim (1994) andAbusch (1997) for discussion of this idea.3 Embedded tenses, which show up in attitude contexts, make all of this more complicated. ...
... After all, in earlier theories, such as that ofChomsky (1981), what we had was an undifferentiated inflectional layer IP.Pollock (1989) was central to showing that we have multiple inflectional layers, with TP near the top. 11 SeeOgihara (1996) andAbusch (1997). Apparently the label woll was suggested by Mats Rooth. ...
We study three different conceptions of tense emerging from semantics, syntax and morphology, respectively. We investigate how they bear on the question of the relationship between tense and modality as they emerge in Cariani’s The Modal Future (2021).
... We make a general distinction between two kinds of aspects: viewpoint aspects like the perfective and imperfective vs. the perfect (or retrospective) and prospective, which we will call high aspects. 9 High aspects express relations between the reference time, contributed by tense, and another temporal interval, see (7a) for the meaning of prospective woll (Abusch, 1997), and (7b) for the meaning of the perfect in English and German (Pancheva & von Stechow, 2004). 10 We follow Tonhauser (2006Tonhauser ( , 2011a in treating -ta in Paraguayan Guarani, seen in (2a), as a prospective aspectual marker. ...
... The argument relies on a likely semantic universal: languages with overt tense do not describe future events with a future tense; instead, they commonly use a present tense and a prospective marker, e.g., English woll (Bochnak, 2019, a.o.). The absence of a future tense among the world's languages would follow if there is a universal constraint on the possible lexical semantics of tense, as has been suggested by Abusch (1997). This empirically-motivated restriction on the possible meaning of tense would be expected to apply to covert tense as well. ...
... In addition to encoding prospective aspect, -ta also has a modal component, expressing intentions and predictions (Tonhauser, 2011a, b). 29 In that sense it is similar to the English modal prospective woll (Abusch 1997). 30 We put the issue of modality aside in this paper. ...
Paraguayan Guarani does not overtly mark tense in its inflectional system. Prior accounts of languages without obligatory morphological tense have posited a phonologically covert lexical tense, or have introduced tense semantics via a rule, in the post-syntactic interpretative component. We offer a more radical approach: Paraguayan Guarani does not have tense at the level of lexical or logical semantics. We propose that evaluation time shift, a mechanism independently attested in the narrative present in languages with tense, is more widely used in Paraguayan Guarani for encoding temporal meaning. The broader consequence of our proposal is that tense is not a linguistic universal.
... Only by assigning a syntactic structure to Birds that fly instinctively swim one can establish whether instinctively relates to fly or swim (Chomsky 2017, p. 201). Therefore, it has been suggested that syntactic structure, as it relates to the underlying semantics, is also the main factor that determines temporal interpretation (e.g., Abusch, 1997;Enç, 1987;Ogihara, 1995;Stowell, 2007). ...
... This prediction arises due to the special status of relative clauses: that was near the mushroom is a modification of the syntactic object, not of the verb describing an event. Consequently, relative clauses are not governed by the matrix verb (Enç, 1987), they can move out of the matrix verb's scope to a higher position (Ogihara, 1996;Stowell, 2007), and they are not arguments to intensional predicates (Abusch, 1997;Von Stechow & Grønn, 2013a). ...
... By contrast, complement clauses are verbal arguments such that they need to be evaluated relative to the time denoted by the matrix sentence (cf. Abusch, 1997;Enç, 1987;Kusumoto, 1999;Ogihara, 1996;Stowell, 2007 for a detailed discussion on tense interpretation in complement clauses; note that, aside from relative, complement and temporal clauses, no further subordinate clauses have been analyzed with respect to temporal interpretation). ...
Linguistic descriptions of complex events have to map their temporal structure onto language. Formal accounts of embedded tense have argued that syntax mirrors event structure: Following directly from the syntactic properties of relative clauses, in complex sentences, events described by a relative clause are interpreted only relative to the utterance time and bear no temporal relation to the events of a matrix clause. From an event structural perspective, however, the temporal relationships between events do not have to mirror syntactic relations; rather, a central, salient event may anchor peripheral situations in time independent of its syntactic encoding. In two studies in English and German, we test which interpretations are accessible for past-under-past relative clauses, showing that tense interpretation in relative clauses is dependent on the matrix clause-at least when the matrix sentence describes a salient anchoring event, and the relative clause a backgrounded situation. Our results challenge the assumption that syntactic dependencies determine the temporal construal of events and provide new insight into how temporal semantic features are mapped onto linguistic structure.
... The basic idea underlying this account is that when a past tense occurs immediately under another past tense, the lower one (optionally) becomes semantically empty, yielding a simultaneous reading. 3 Although there are different ways of encoding this idea, I shall assume for the purpose of this article that Abusch (1988Abusch ( , 1997, Ogihara (1996), von Stechow (1995, Stowell (1996), and Kratzer (1998) are all subsumed under this traditional account. ...
... First, let us discuss the case of would. Abusch (1988Abusch ( , 1997 posits the tenseless form woll, which underlies both would (past) and will (present). The morphological analysis assumed here is given in (8). ...
... Regarding double access sentences, the reader is referred toOgihara (1995Ogihara ( , 1996 andAbusch (1991Abusch ( , 1997 for basic data and some possible analyses. 6 Strictly speaking, the implicature in question is the denial of the existence of cessation implicature: it is not the case that the state in question stopped before the time of the matrix predicate. ...
Altshuler & Schwarzschild (2013a, 2013b) provide an account of the simultaneous reading of past-under-past sentences in English (called the sequence-of-tense (SOT) phenomenon) based on a lack of cessation implicature. However, this analysis encounters empirical and technical issues in accounting for the English data in the same construction involving the future auxiliary would, the past perfect, and the future-under-future configuration. It also faces difficulty in accounting for the cross-linguistic data that concerns tense in verb complements. We are, therefore, led to conclude that the traditional solution to this problem (Abusch 1988, 1997, Ogihara 1996, von Stechow 1995, Stowell 1996, and Kratzer 1998) that renders structurally lower past tense morphemes in English semantically empty (or plain variables) is preferable. This system allows us to adopt the same semantic mechanism for both SOT languages such as English and non-SOT languages such as Japanese.
... The data presented above pose a challenge to the two popular approaches that derive the simultaneous interpretation of past-under-past constructions in English: the temporal de se approach and the temporal de re approach. 9 Under the temporal de se approach (e.g., Abusch 1994Abusch , 1997Ogihara 1996), the embedded past in a pastunder-past configuration indicates the temporal center of the doxastic alternatives (also known as "the attitude holder's 'now"'). According to the temporal de re approach (Abusch 1994(Abusch , 1997Sharvit 2018Sharvit , 2021, the embedded past denotes the temporal res, i.e., an actual time preceding the utterance time and overlapping the time denoted by the matrix past. ...
... 9 Under the temporal de se approach (e.g., Abusch 1994Abusch , 1997Ogihara 1996), the embedded past in a pastunder-past configuration indicates the temporal center of the doxastic alternatives (also known as "the attitude holder's 'now"'). According to the temporal de re approach (Abusch 1994(Abusch , 1997Sharvit 2018Sharvit , 2021, the embedded past denotes the temporal res, i.e., an actual time preceding the utterance time and overlapping the time denoted by the matrix past. A de re mechanism associates the temporal res with a temporal concept perceived by the attitude holder and overlapping the attitude holder's "now". ...
This paper delves into the temporal interpretation of fronting constructions in English, a topic that has received limited attention in the literature on tense semantics. It presents new empirical findings revealing that specific fronting configurations, involving present tense morphology in a complement CP under a matrix past tense, can yield a theoretically unexpected simultaneous interpretation. A novel theoretical framework for understanding English tense is proposed, which accounts for the temporal interpretation of both fronting and non-fronting versions of attitude reports. The framework introduces a null simultaneous tense as a replacement for the conventional indexical present and the Sequence-of-Tense (SOT) de se tense. It is argued that in complement CPs the null simultaneous tense, as well as past tense, can be anchored either to the attitude time or to the utterance time. In either case, each tense receives a de re interpretation. Moreover, the paper contends that evidence from fronting constructions supports Kratzer’s (Proceedings of semantics and linguistic theory 8, pp. 92–110, 1998) proposal that the transmission of temporal features (as part of the mechanism of SOT) occurs at PF. Finally, the proposed revision of the English tense system contributes to a more unified cross-linguistic perspective on tense. It is demonstrated how the temporal readings of attitude reports arising in such non-SOT languages as Russian, Japanese, and Hebrew can be captured within the system developed for English, with known contrasts attributed to the absence of Feature Transmission in those languages. Further known and new data from English, Modern Greek, and German are examined, revealing variations in SOT effects across SOT languages. These data are used as additional evidence supporting the claim that cross-linguistic variation in the interpretation of complement tense stems solely from differences in Feature Transmission. Regarding the semantic profile of tenses, it can be considered largely invariant.
... Elements that only pragmatically express -but do not semantically denote -such a property (here: experience-likeness) include the exclamative brrr (see (2); see Vendler 1979). Further linguistic correlates of experience-likeness are present tense (marked by a solid underline in (2)-(3); see Abusch 1997) and progressive aspect (marked by a dashed underline; see Umbach et al. 2022). Correlates of mental imagery and sense of self further include rich descriptive detail (Addis et al. 2008; St. Jacques and Levine 2007) and, respectively, the silent pronoun pro (which simultaneously marks field perspective; see Liefke 2024c). ...
... The past-directed interpretation of embedded clauses in (4a) is due to the fact that, in English, tenseless embedded clauses have a simultaneous and a back-shifted interpretation (seeOgihara 1989;Abusch 1997; who have discussed this phenomenon as 'Sequence of Tense'). ...
Much recent work in philosophy of memory discusses the question whether episodic remembering is continuous with imagining. This paper contributes to the debate between continuists and discontinuists by considering a previously neglected source of evidence for continuism: the linguistic properties of overt memory and imagination reports (e.g. sentences of the form ‘x remembers/imagines p’). I argue that the distribution and truth-conditional contribution of episodic uses of the English verb remember is surprisingly similar to that of the verb imagine – even when compared to the distribution of other experiential attitude verbs like see, hallucinate, or dream. This holds despite the presence of some remarkable truth-conditional differences between remember and imagine. I show how these differences can be explained by a continuist account of remembering, on which remembering is past-directed, referential, and accurate experiential imagining.
... It could be that both the matrix and the embedded past are interpreted relative to the time of utterance, and their temporal references happen to coincide. This is often referred to as temporal de re (Abusch 1997). Another possibility is that the tense feature of the embedded past is simply uninterpreted, or deleted, due to the presence of a c-commanding tense with an agreeing feature, following the well-known sequence-of-tense rule. ...
... In fact, to some extent, this is the position that many previous approaches take (e.g. Ogihara 1996, Abusch 1997, Kratzer 1998, Kusumoto 1999, Ogihara & Sharvit 2012. In this case, the present and ⌜then⌝ would receive denotations like the following: Assume the (quite standard) semantics for speech/attitude predicates still hold, thus treating them as quantifiers over evaluation indices (see (18)). ...
The temporal adverbial 'then' is cross-linguistically incompatible with the present tense, not only in matrix but also in embedded clauses. In languages such as Modern Greek, Russian, Modern Hebrew, and Japanese, where the present tense can shift referring to the ‘now’ of the attitude holder rather than the time of the utterance, then remains incompatible with the present, even though the latter denotes a time in the past or future (Ogihara & Sharvit 2012, Sharvit 2018, Vostrikova 2018, Tsilia 2021). Additionally, in Modern Greek, 'then' is at the same time compatible with a deleted past (Abusch 1997), which is interpreted as a present from the point of view of the attitude holder (Tsilia 2022). Thus, 'then' is incompatible with the shifted present, but compatible with the deleted past in the same language, suggesting that the two are not semantically equivalent. We introduce a new interpretation parameter, which we call ‘temporal perspective’. The interpretation of tenses and of 'then' is sensitive to the temporal perspective. Tense shift is a result of the shift of the perspective, and the incompatibility between 'then' and the present is derived as a shift together effect (Anand & Nevins 2004, Sudo 2012, Deal 2020). On the other hand, the deleted past is assumed to be stripped of its perspective sensitivity, and therefore does not clash with 'then'. We also provide empirical support for distinguishing the perspective from the context and the evaluation index.
... 18 See e.g., Abusch (1997). In English, sequence of tense for instance occurs in indirect speech reports on past events. ...
... Reports with past or future tense attitude verbs (see e.g.,'Adeela believed/will believe that Sara is nervous') pose additional complications since tense in these reports can be bound rather than indexical (see e.g.,Abusch (1997),Toshyuki and Sharvit (2012)). ...
Semanticists and philosophers of fiction that formulate analyses of reports on the content of media—or ‘contensive statements’—of the form ‘In/According to s, ϕ’, usually treat the ‘In s’-operator (In) and the ‘According to s’-operator (Acc) on a par. I argue that In and Acc require separate semantic analyses based on three clusters of linguistic observations: (1) preferences for In or Acc in contensive statements about fictional or non-fictional media, (2) preferences for In or Acc in contensive statements about implicit or explicit content and (3) tense preferences in contensive statements with In and Acc. To account for these three observations I propose to adopt Lewis’s possible world analysis for contensive statements with In and to analyse contensive statements with Acc as indirect speech reports.
... We should mention that there are two ways to implement an SOT rule that accounts for temporal de se. One is by feature deletion under c-command (Ogihara, 1996;Sharvit, 2003Sharvit, , 2018, another is by feature transmission under agreement (Abusch, 1997;Grønn and von Stechow, 2010). Semantically, whether a feature is deleted or inserted will not make any difference, so for the purposes of this paper, we will follow Ogihara (1996) and Sharvit (2003Sharvit ( , 2018 in stating the SOT rule in terms of feature deletion, as illustrated in (3). ...
... But why would we posit an SOT rule in the first place if we can explain the data in terms of temporal de re? Abusch (1994Abusch ( , 1997 argues that an SOT rule is needed, because temporal de re cannot account for all attested simultaneous readings (Ogihara, 1996;von Stechow, 1995von Stechow, , 2003. She provides the following example (reconstructed from Kamp and Rohrer (1983)): ...
Abstract:
Embedded tense in Modern Greek (MG) displays an unexpected “optionality”: both present and past tenses can be used under a past tense attitude verb to convey a simultaneous reading. Building on Schlenker (1999) and Sharvit (2003, 2018), we claim that MG has a mixed tense system, being able to delete the embedded past like English and shift the embedded present like Russian and Hebrew. Thus, the correlation between having either a deleted past or a shiftable present but not both is accidental. This is theoretically important because it confirms that the two parameters are independent. We also complete the characterization of MG present tense in the cross-linguistic typology of embedded tense, claiming that it behaves like Russian and unlike Japanese, since our data suggest that it does not shift in non-attitudinal environments. Thus, we conclude that two parameters are active in attitudinal environments in MG: (i) a deleted past, and (ii) a shiftable present. Are these two the only routes to the simultaneous reading? There could in principle be a third one, namely interpreting the embedded past de re, i.e., with respect to the time of the utterance. However, we argue that this would over-generate simultaneous readings for languages without a deletion rule, such as Hebrew and Russian. We propose an analysis of the data based on Prefer De Se, predicting that there are indeed two roads to the simultaneous reading in MG.
Published paper here: https://repository.upenn.edu/pwpl/vol28/iss1/22/
... It can rain hard in this part of the world Hacquard (2006) Epistemic and root modals have also been argued to differ in temporal properties, both in terms of Temporal Perspective (the time at which the modality is evaluated) and Temporal Orientation (the time at which the prejacent is evaluated relative to the modal's time of evaluation). In terms of Temporal Perspective (TP), many argue that while root modals' TP is set by tense, epistemics always have a present TP (Groenendijk & Stokhof, 1975, Stowell, 2004, Abusch, 1997, Hacquard, 2006. This is often taken to follow from a 5 Roots and epistemics are also argued to differ in their interactions with negation and with each other, but neither seems promising for acquiring English modals: (i) the scope of negation is not transparent and is subject to lexical idiosyncrasies (e.g., negation appears below modal auxiliaries, but can be interpreted above some: epistemic may scopes over negation, deontic may scopes under, must scopes over negation under both interpretations); (ii) double modals do not occur in the variety of English we examine. ...
... We only found 1 epistemic had to in 339,795 utterances (2,400 have to) in the Manchester corpus. 7 Whether epistemics allow future TO is a matter of debate: for some authors, they do(Condoravdi, 2002), for others, epistemics disallow future TO because of an incompatibility between the uncertainty of the future and the certainty of epistemic modality(Thomason, 1970;Abusch, 1997; Werner 2006;Klecha, 2016). ...
This paper investigates how children figure out that modals like must can be used to express both epistemic and “root” (i.e. non epistemic) flavors. The existing acquisition literature shows that children produce modals with epistemic meanings up to a year later than with root meanings. We conducted a corpus study to examine how modality is expressed in speech to and by young children, to investigate the ways in which the linguistic input children hear may help or hinder them in uncovering the flavor flexibility of modals. Our results show that the way parents use modals may obscure the fact that they can express epistemic flavors: modals are very rarely used epistemically. Yet, children eventually figure it out; our results suggest that some do so even before age 3. To investigate how children pick up on epistemic flavors, we explore distributional cues that distinguish roots and epistemics. The semantic literature argues they differ in “temporal orientation” (Condoravdi, 2002): while epistemics can have present or past orientation, root modals tend to be constrained to future orientation (Werner 2006; Klecha, 2016; Rullmann & Matthewson, 2018). We show that in child-directed speech, this constraint is well-reflected in the distribution of aspectual features of roots and epistemics, but that the signal might be weak given the strong usage bias towards roots. We discuss (a) what these results imply for how children might acquire adult-like modal representations, and (b) possible learning paths towards adult-like modal representations.
... • as feature transmission under agreement (e.g., Abusch (1997); Grønn and von Stechow (2010)) Semantically, whether a feature is deleted or inserted will not make any difference, so for the purposes of this talk, we will follow Ogihara (1996) and Sharvit ( , 2018 in stating the SOT rule in terms of feature deletion. Here is the SOT rule we will use (reconstructed from Ogihara (1996); Sharvit (2018)): ...
... Why would we posit an SOT rule in the first place if we can explain the data in terms of temporal de re? Abusch (1994Abusch ( , 1997 argues that an SOT rule is needed, because temporal de re cannot account for all attested simultaneous readings (see also Ogihara (1996);von Stechow (1995von Stechow ( , 2003), as we saw in (2). ...
Talk at NYU Reference across Modalities and Domains Seminar
... Temporal interpretations differ in English, German, and Polish with regard to the so-called sequence of tense (SoT) phenomenon, which emerges for temporal interpretations in embedded contexts: In complement clause constructions (e.g., The vet said that the bison stood on the truck), an embedded past tense can have non-past meaning, in addition to signaling anteriority, such that it may be interpreted simultaneously with the time denoted by the matrix clause. English is a clear case of an SoT language (Abusch, 1997;Declerck, 1988;Ogihara, 1995;Stowell, 2007), and German has likewise been classified as such (Boskovic, 2012) but, to the best of our knowledge, a systematic formal and empirical analysis is lacking (see Giorgi & Pianesi, 2000;von Stechow, 2005, for alternative assessments). In contrast to English, SoT ambiguities in German complement clauses can be resolved by optional subjunctive marking (Eckardt, 2021;Helbig & Buscha, 2001). ...
To build an accurate mental model of complex situations, people infer temporal order from sometimes underspecified linguistic information. The basis on which these inferences are drawn is an open question. While previous literature has focused on the role of linguistic structure and discourse pragmatic strategies as important contributors to temporal inferences, here we argue that, under uncertainty, people also use the dynamic properties of the described situations to derive temporal order from language. In three pre‐registered studies using English, German, and Polish, adult participants used toys to act out complex situations described by main clause‐relative clause structures. We consistently find that non‐dynamic state descriptions are temporally ordered first, if the other clause describes a dynamic event. This pattern arises independently of whether dynamicity differences are lexically encoded, like in English or German, or grammatically encoded, like in Polish. More generally, our findings address an important gap in the discussion on the role of eventuality type for temporal inference. While there is substantial research on the significance of telicity and durativity, a third, much more overlooked feature is dynamicity, a concept rooted in event perception, not language. Our results therefore provide a crucial thread to closely weave together language comprehension and event cognition.
... non-temporal forms) and/or future tense in general with modal interpretation. I believe that the I&F's paper can be seen as another piece of evidence that future shares, at least to some 'degree' (as for PF; (Giannakidou & Mari, 2021)), a semantic modal core as it has been addressed in the literature (Abusch, 1997;Bybee & Pagliuca, 1987;Cariani & Santorio, 2018;Copley, 2002;Giannakidou & Mari, 2023;Mari, 2018). Thus, 'talking about the future' seems to involve modality, that is, according to the standard 'modal future hypothesis' (Cariani, 2021b), the meaning of a future sentence like b) 'The boy will go to school' is understood in comparison with its (modal) counterfactual claim, such c) 'The boy would have gone to school if it had not rained'. ...
In this essay, I highlight Ippolito and Farkas's (2022) core analysis ingredients of the non-temporal interpretation of the Italian future tense so-called 'presumptive' or 'epistemic', which they label as PF. The aim is twofold, on the one hand, stressing what I believe are the pivotal assumptions of I&F's proposal, and on the other hand, evaluating these assumptions in the current debate, especially discussing the hypothesis that the future morpheme (FUT) is formally treated as epistemic modal.
... In other words, since the tense in the matrix is past tense, the tense in the subordinate is also past tense even though the event described can be interpreted as occuring before or after the utterance time. This phenomenon is called "sequence of tense" (SOT) (see Abusch 1988Abusch , 1997Kratzer 1998;Ogihara 1989Ogihara , 1994; among others). 4 (20) ...
This paper describes quotative constructions in Karitiana such as 'X said P'. Quotative constru ctions are complex structures that have two or more verbs and a syntactic and/or a semantic embedding between them (van Gijn, Haude & Muysken 2011; Lima & Veenstra 2021). The data analyzed here is taken from two narratives, "Osiip" and "Gokyp", as well as from contextualized elicitation based on quotative questionnaires. The speakers who answered the quotative questionnaires/data elicitation used strategies for quotation which differed from the ones found in the narratives. The most recurrent quotative construction in elicited data is the intransitive verb 'a 'to do/make' to convey the meaning 'to say'. Data from narratives show a pattern in which the reporting verb usually occurs with the quotative prefix iri. One interesting fact is that quotative constructions are neither direct speech nor indirect speech. Evidence for this includes the following observations: (i) the reporting verb is an intransitive verb, (ii) the quotation behaves like a main clause, (iii) switching indexical elements is optional, and (iv) quotative constructions display semantic embedding without syntactic embedding. RESUMO Este artigo descreve as construções citativas em Karitiana tais como 'X disse P'. Construções citativas são estruturas complexas, ou seja, estruturas que possuem dois ou mais verbos e uma subordinação sintática e/ou semântica entre eles (van Gijn, Haude & Muysken 2011; Lima & Veenstra 2021). Os dados analisados aqui foram retirados de duas narrativas, "Osiip" e "Gokyp", e também são provenientes de elicitação contextualizada de dados baseada em questionários citativos. Os falantes que responderam aos questionários citativos usaram estratégias de citação diferentes daquelas que foram atestadas nas narrativas. A construção citativa mais recorrente nos dados elicitados é o verbo intransitivo 'a 'fazer' com sentido de 'dizer'. Os dados das narrativas mostram um padrão no qual verbos que reportam uma fala geralmente ocorrem com o prefixo citativo iri. Um fato interessante é que as construções citativas nessa língua não podem ser classificadas nem como discurso direto e nem como discurso indireto. Evidências para isso é que: (i) o verbo citativo é um verbo intransitivo, (ii) a citação se comporta como uma oração matriz, (iii) a mudança de indexicais é opcional e (iv) essas construções possuem subordinação semântica sem subordinação sintática.
... One way is such that the attitude verb binds not only the world variable, but also a time variable, and doxastic alternatives are sets of world-time pairs (the worlds that could be the real worlds from the holder's perspective and times that could be their actual now) and not simply sets of worlds (cf. Abusch, 1997, Ogihara, 2007, von Fintel & Heim 2011. Another way is to disregard a notion of worlds and adopt a different semantic primitive, such as situations that are considered to be spatiotemporal parts of possible worlds (cf. ...
The present work explores the interpretation of indirect reports such as “John said that his brother is a genius” in relation to the propositional attitude they ascribe (John believes that his brother is a genius) and their reference to a specific utterance event (the act of John saying that). By comparing indirect reports to standard attitude ascriptions introduced by verbs like think, in different presuppositional environments, I will show that speech verbs (a) bear a systematic relationship with one or many speech events and (b) systematically involve the ascription of a propositional attitude to the agent of the report. In spite of this, verbs of speech (i.e. say), unlike standard attitude ascriptions (i.e. think), can allow a detachment from the propositional commitment to the speaker’s beliefs in context in which a presupposition is violated.
Furthermore, I will show that the two classes of predicates behave similarly in contexts where the violated presupposition is triggered by additive particles like too, but rather differently when the presupposition is triggered by scalar particles like only and even. Finally, the examination of same-saying examples will shed some light on how grammar, semantic and pragmatic operations interplay during the interpretation of reports. Overall, the idea emerging from the present inquiry is that their most stable meaning component is the attitude ascription, with the speech component, i.e. the referent to an utterance event, seeming more difficult to define and context-dependent.
... An Akan speaker would never pronounce such toneless particle, but add a Low or High tone, generating what we called a lt-na or a ht-na, respectively, according to the kind of linking the speaker wishes to indicate. To appreciate the abstract toneless morpheme Root-na in Akan, compare it to the abstract tenseless morpheme woll suggested by Abusch (1997) for English. As analyzed by Abusch, the tenseless (modal) morpheme woll is never pronounced by English speakers and is realized as 'will' or 'would', depending on the tense of the said clause. ...
Grammatical accounts of na in Akan identify two different forms: nà with a low tone (LT-na) and ná with a high tone (HT-na). LT-na functions in two ways: as a focus marker or a conjunction, the latter of which can take a prefix and be realized as ɛna. While some scholars treat them as two different na’s, others point to a commonality between the two. HT-na has been analyzed as functioning as past and future tenses, and a logical connector. We argue that these three HT-na along with the two LT-na are subcategories of a super-category. We propose that the super-category is a non-tonal na (call it Root-na), with a common basic meaning which explains all five seemingly unrelated interpretations. Root-na links the na-clause with something in the common ground, i.e., to something that appeared in the previous context or is presupposed. It is spelled out as a LT-na or HT-na, depending on the kind of linking. LT-na marks discourse coherence relations such as focus and narrative-sequence, both of which are shown in the linguistics literature to be anaphoric. HT-na is an intensional marker which links times or possible worlds.
... ▶ When op π is absent, the contradiction arises because none shifts, and they have conflicting presuppositions. Tense Deletion ▶ The past is deleted, as Abusch (1994Abusch ( , 1997 showed: ...
This talk focuses on the then-present puzzle, namely the observation that the present tense is incompatible with the temporal adverbial ‘then’ (Ogihara & Sharvit 2012; Vostrikova 2018; Tsilia 2021). This is attested not only in root clauses (e.g. *John is then not feeling well), but also in embedded clauses (e.g. *John thought that Mary is pregnant then) across languages such as Russian, Modern Hebrew, Modern Greek and Japanese where the embedded present can 'shift’ to overlap not with the time of utterance, but with the time of the embedding attitude/speech. We propose to account for this generalisation by assuming i) that the present tense and ‘then’ are both sensitive to a temporal perspective shared by all expressions within a minimal clausal domain, and ii) the present and 'then' carry contradicting perspectival presuppositions. The perspective is modelled closely after the context as an interpretation parameter; we will briefly discuss their connections and differences.
On this basis, we further investigate the cross-linguistic behaviour of (embedded) clauses where ‘then’ co-occurs with past tenses. A particularly interesting case concerns the so-called deleted past tense, observed in languages such as English and Modern Greek, whose past tense feature is apparently uninterpreted when embedded under a higher past tense. The deleted past tense has long been thought to be semantically indistinguishable from the shifted present tense, but only the deleted past is compatible with 'then’. The difference can be easily accommodated within the current analysis by assuming that unlike non-deleted tenses (including the shifted present), deleted tenses are not perspective-sensitive.
... Hence, the past tense in these cases is an instantiation of so-called Sequence of Tense (cf. Abusch 1997;Sharvit 2021). ...
The simple past in Dutch, as in many other European languages, is not necessarily used to refer to a past eventuality. A Dutch example of a verb in simple past that does not refer to a past event, taken from the Spoken Dutch Corpus (CGN), is: Pa die ging morgen golfen ‘Dad is going to play golf tomorrow.’ Here, the past tense verb ging ‘went’ can be called a ‘fake past’, since it refers to a future eventuality, as can be seen from the adverb tomorrow . We argue that this use of the past tense is not modal, because it does not involve reference to a counterfactual, hypothetical, or unlikely eventuality. We present a Reichenbachian (1947) analysis of this use of past tense, in which we argue that while the eventuality takes place in the future, past tense is used to indicate that the point of perspective (R) is situated in the past (i.e. R-S-E).
... In addition to the question of what categories of temporal operators languages make use of, another question that has received significant attention in the literature on temporal semantics is the behavior of temporal operators, especially tense, in dependent clauses. It is well known at this point that the encoding of temporal meanings is not identical in matrix and dependent clauses, with phenomena such as Sequence of Tense (Abusch 1997;Dowty 1982;Enç 1987, among many, many others) providing a prime example of this. In this paper, I explore how Amahuaca's TRMs are used within adjunct switch-reference clauses to express temporal relationships between events across clauses. ...
Many languages of lowland South America mark remoteness distinctions in their TAM systems. In Amahuaca (Panoan; Peru) multiple remoteness distinctions are made in the past and the future. I argue that the temporal remoteness morphemes (TRMs) of Amahuaca can be understood as indications of the remoteness of the event time relative to the utterance time in matrix environments. In dependent clauses, however, the picture is more complicated. By exploring adjunct switch-reference clauses, I show that TRMs in dependent clauses display a previously unreported ambiguity reminiscent of ambiguities found with adjunct tense. Specifically, they can relate the time of the adjunct clause event to the time of the matrix event or to the utterance time. I suggest that this ambiguity may arise from the availability of multiple interpretation sites for adjunct TRMs, with the possible interpretations being constrained by the temporal semantics of switch-reference markers themselves. This work thus contributes to the empirical understanding of how TRMs are interpreted in dependent clauses, suggesting interesting potential parallels to the interpretation of adjunct tense.
... I should mention that there are two ways to implement an SOT rule. One is by feature deletion under c-command (Ogihara 1996;Sharvit 2003Sharvit , 2018, another is by feature transmission under agreement (Abusch 1997;Grønn & Von Stechow 2010). Semantically, whether a feature is deleted or inserted will not make any difference, so for the purposes of this paper, I will follow Ogihara (1996) and Sharvit (2003Sharvit ( , 2018 in stating the SOT rule in terms of feature deletion. ...
Proceedings available here: https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/binaries/content/assets/geesteswetenschappen/lucl/console30-proceedings.pdf
Past-under-past only sometimes yields simultaneous readings in non-Sequence of Tense (SOT) languages. I claim that a distinction should be made among non-SOT speakers. Indeed, only some of them get temporal de re readings of the embedded past. An analysis in terms of an individually parametrized Prefer Local Binding rule in the temporal domain is proposed, prioritizing logical forms with locally bound temporal variables. So, present-under-past temporal de se is preferred over past-under-past temporal de re to get simultaneous readings. Finally, interspeaker variation is predicted for SOT languages and a new diagnostic for temporal de re in SOT languages is developed.
... But why would we posit an SOT rule in the first place if we can explain the data in terms of temporal de re? Abusch (1994Abusch ( , 1997 argues that an SOT rule is needed, because temporal de re cannot account for all attested simultaneous readings (Ogihara 1996, von Stechow 1995. She provides the following example (reconstructed from Kamp and Rohrer 1983): ...
Embedded tense in Modern Greek (MG) displays an unexpected “optionality”: both present and past tenses can be used under a past tense attitude verb to convey a simultaneous reading. Building on Schlenker (1999) and Sharvit (2003, 2018), we claim that MG has a mixed tense system, being able to delete the embedded past like English and shift the embedded present like Russian and Hebrew. Thus, the correlation between having either a deleted past or a shiftable present but not both is accidental. This is theoretically important because it confirms that the two parameters are independent. We also complete the characterization of MG present tense in the cross-linguistic typology of embedded tense, claiming that it behaves like Russian and unlike Japanese, since our data suggest that it does not shift in non-attitudinal environments. Thus, we conclude that two parameters are active in attitudinal environments in MG: (i) a deleted past, and (ii) a shiftable present. Are these two the only routes to the simultaneous reading? There could in principle be a third one, namely interpreting the embedded past de re, i.e., with respect to the time of the utterance. However, we argue that this would over-generate simultaneous readings for languages without a deletion rule, such as Hebrew and Russian. We propose an analysis of the data based on Prefer De Se, predicting that there are indeed two roads to the simultaneous reading in MG.
... As is well known, the embedded finite clause may give rise to the double-access reading (DAR) (Ogihara 1995;Abusch 1997;Giorgi and Pianesi 1997;Giorgi 2010). The availability of the DAR indicates that both the external time t* and the internal time t' can access the embedded time t, as exemplified in (28a-b) (Mary's pregnancy holds at least from John's saying to now), where R represents the relation among times, O stands for temporal overlapping, and (28c) illustrates the temporal relation: 7 ...
It is generally assumed that the notion of finiteness is not applicable to Chinese due to the lack of grammatical tense/person agreement. Meanwhile, syntactic evidence suggests that the finiteness distinction can be made from predicate types in Chinese, but exactly how finiteness is defined and why predicate types may determine finiteness in Chinese remain obscure. The paper argues that the paradox of finiteness distinction in Chinese can be solved if we assume a parameterized version of Bianchi’s (2003) definition of finiteness based on logophoric anchoring. Specifically, due to the lack of tense or person agreement, Chinese employs ‘world’ as the primary anchoring device, and since world-anchoring is correlated to the propositional attitude of the matrix predicate, this gives us an explanation why the finiteness of Chinese is sensitive to predicate types. We further argue that infinitive control complements are embedded jussive clauses in Chinese, and the internal world-anchoring is forced by a performative modal element that is present in both jussive and control clauses. By assuming that the embedded control clause is a centered proposition (a set of individual-world pairs) and the performative modal element anchors it to the internal speaker/addressee, the semantic mechanism allows us to unify various proposals regarding control and finiteness.
... (41) Relative clauses: semantic types a. restrictives (Partee 1973, Grosu 2002, Bianchi 2002b, Browning 1987or Abusch 1997 b. non-restrictives, or appositives (Smits 1988, Grosu 2002 c. amount or maximalizing (Carlson 1977, Loccioni 2018, Cinque 2019, Grosu andLandman 1998, Heim 1987) e di erence in the semantic contribution of the material internal (the relative clause) or external (the head) to the RC is illustrated by Grosu and Landman (1998) in Table (2). To be er understand what is captured by Table (2), look at appositives for which the reference is described as deriving solely from external material (the head). ...
In this dissertation, we aim at investigating the syntactic complexity of LSF. We start with the well studied (in other sign languages) case of relativization strategies, which instantiates both subordination and recursive embedding. These properties have repeatedly been argued to be at the heart of human languages; hence, relative clauses are the flag holder of every understudied language aiming at seeing its status recognized. Regarding LSF, we describe two manual markers that we analyze as d-like relative pronouns, as well as a non-manually marked alternative strategy, and we show that LSF has both internally and externally headed relative clauses. We show that, depending on the relative pronoun used, the relatives instantiates different semantic properties. We integrate our findings in a generative formal framework. We also investigate the processing of subject and object relative clauses in this language, through the adaptation of a well-known eye-tracking paradigm. Through this experimental study, we find the existence of a Subject advantage in LSF. In the second part of the dissertation, we investigate several complex sentences: temporal constructions, question-answer pairs and sentential complements. While we know from spoken languages researches that temporal constructions surface through a variety of syntactic strategies such as subordination, juxtaposition or coordination, finding their equivalent in sign languages is often a challenge due to the absence of overt complementizers and other function words such as coordinators. This dissertation explores temporal constructions in LSF and frames them within a broad typological perspective. We show that LSF temporal clauses are very different from those of LIS. In particular, LSF constructions use two coordinated clauses, and the temporal marker is part of the second conjunct. Regarding Question Answer Pairs (QAP), a growing literature has emerged on sign languages describing this particular construction, which looks like a question followed by its fragment answer, but which crucially is not interpreted as such. In Kimmelman and Vink (2017), the authors propose the existence of a grammaticalization process, starting with information-seeking questions and ending with a question-answer constituent, creating a bridge between two of the main analyses that have been proposed in the literature to account for these constructions across sign languages. We demonstrate, based on an extensive depiction of LSF QAP properties, that the grammaticalization scale proposed in Kimmelman and Vink (2017) has to be further developed to integrate free relatives as its ending point. Finally, we provide a rather extensive investigation of sentential complements in LSF, showing that, in their vast majority, they are subordinated to the main predicate. We also show that LSF displays various types of complements, either finite, non-finite, or introduced by a complementizer.
... Before I discuss my updated proposal, I will first briefly summarize Schulz's (2008) analysis. Schulz (2008) analyzes the tenses in conditionals as non-deictic, evaluated relative to the local evaluation time, based on the proposal by Abusch (1997). Schulz states that the local evaluation time might differ from the utterance time in the scope of intentional operators, in this casethe conditionals. ...
This paper aims to render an explanation for the interpretations of the Turkish aorist when it occurs at the antecedent clause of a conditional. I argue that at the main predicate position the aorist marker has two main interpretations, namely the future-oriented and the characterizing ones. However, inside the antecedent clause, these readings are not readily accessible in the way that they are at the consequent clause, i.e., the main predicate of the conditional. I tackle this situation from two different perspectives and layout two proposals. Based on Kratzer’s (1986, 1991) well-known restrictor analysis of conditionals, my first proposal is that the aorist marker is licensed in the antecedent clause only if the consequent clause has one of its matrix clause interpretations. Nonetheless, various examples allow the aorist marker in the antecedent even though the consequent clause has neither the future-oriented nor the characterizing interpretations. Therefore, I change my approach and make a final proposal that satisfactorily describes both the cases that conform to my initial proposal and the ones that do not. I propose that the aorist in the antecedent either sets the evaluation time of the consequent to the future, in line with Schulz’s (2008) analysis or makes a quantification over situations, as von Fintel (1994) argues for.
In this paper it is argued that the Hungarian future auxiliary fog is a modal rather than a temporal operator. As opposed to previous findings in the literature, the paper claims that it can be used when the proposition is inferred, therefore it can have an epistemic modal base. The results of a questionnaire study and introspective data are presented to support this claim. Based on these data, it is argued that the distributional difference between fog and the non-past cannot be explained by the presence or absence of temporal ambiguity only, the choice also depends on the context. Namely, the use of the non-past is marginal if the speaker infers the truth of the proposition from contextually known facts, while fog is natural and acceptable in such cases. The Hungarian data presented further strengthen the hypothesis that there is a strong connection between future-referring morphemes and epistemic modality.
Recent work on mood choice considers fine-grained semantic differences among desire predicates (notably, ‘want’ and ‘hope’) and their consequences for the distribution of indicative and subjunctive complement clauses. In that vein, this paper takes a close look at ‘intend’. I show that cross-linguistically, ‘intend’ accepts nonfinite and subjunctive complements and rejects indicative complements. This fact poses difficulties for recent approaches to mood choice. Toward a solution, a broad aim of this paper is to argue that—while ‘intend’ is loosely in the family of desire predicates—it differs from ‘want’ and ‘hope’ in that it has a causative component, and this is relevant to its mood choice behavior, given that causative predicates also systematically reject indicative complements. More concretely, my analysis has three ingredients: (i) following related proposals in philosophy, intention reports have causally self-referential content; (ii) encoding causal self-reference requires abstraction over the complement clause’s eventuality argument; and (iii) nonfinite and subjunctive clauses enable such abstraction but indicative clauses do not. Aside from causative predicates, independent support for the proposal comes from the syntax of belief-/intention-hybrid attitude predicates like ‘decide’ and ‘convince’, anankastic conditional antecedents, aspectual predicates, and memory and perception reports. Synthesizing this result with that of previous literature, the emergent generalization is that subjunctive mood occurs in attitude reports that involve either comparison or eventuality abstraction. Toward a unified theory of mood choice, I suggest that both comparison and eventuality abstraction represent departures from the clausal semantics of unembedded assertions and consequently that subjunctive mood signals such a departure.
This study argues that many of the formalizations used in analyses employing the notion of logical scope fail to conform to natural language in important ways and lead to false predictions. This is due to the fact that they pursue the logic-driven goal of making the structure of logical arguments more transparent and mechanically calculable rather than the language-driven goal of accounting for how the linguistic signs used in an utterance and their configuration contribute to the conveying of the message being fashioned by the speaker. The focus of the study is on categories associated with the verb: tense, aspect, modality and negation. The conclusion suggests that very precise and rigid theories using logical scope relations may force the theorist to straitjacket the data so that they fit the theory, thereby obscuring rather than clarifying the nature of linguistic categories and their interactions. Informal analyses that hew closer to natural language’s semantic reality can provide greater understanding of phenomena such as the purported non-negatability of must . Seeing this English modal’s meaning as defined in opposition to real existence leads to the realization that it does not interact with negation the same way as the reality of the existence of the property of being necessary does.
The morphological marking that distinguishes conditionals that are called “counterfactual” from those that are not, can also be found in other modal constructions, such as in the expression of wishes and oughts. We propose to call it “X-marking”. In this article, we lay out desiderata for a successful theory of X-marking and make some initial informal observations. Much remains to be done.
Mackay argues that subjunctive conditionals have two readings, one in which the past tense receives a modal interpretation and one in which it receives a temporal interpretation. The literature on the role of tense in subjunctive conditionals has been divided into so-called “past-as-modal” views, in which the past tense in subjunctives receives a modal interpretation, and “past-as-past” views in which it does not. In this chapter, by contrast, Mackay argues that both readings are available, though the modal reading is more common. The argument is based on conditionals that feature a single layer of past morphology but pertain to past times.
Subjunctive conditionals in English and other languages are marked by Past morphology that does not seem to receive its usual temporal interpretation. Much recent work has focused on how this “fake” Past is interpreted and how conditionals with this marking are related to those without. Based in part on hitherto undiscussed data, this paper proposes a semantic account of indicative and subjunctive conditionals which gives them an essentially uniform analysis, distinguishing within subjunctive marking a mix of fake and not-so-fake elements.
A uniform syntactic and semantic analysis for indicative hypothetical conditionals like If you are hungry, your stomach is growling and biscuit conditionals like If you are hungry, there is pizza in the fridge has been argued for at least since Franke (2009). This is aided by their morphological make-up, in particular with respect to tense and mood. However, when considering their counterfactual versions, If you were hungry, your stomach would be growling and If you were hungry, there is pizza in the fridge respectively, the two forms differ, which posits a challenge to the uniform approach. We argue that such an approach can be maintained by taking two ideas into account: It is possible to break Sequence of Tense and Mood (as in counterfactual biscuits), and certain forms (namely hypothetical counterfactuals with broken Sequence of Tense and Mood and biscuit counterfactuals with Sequence of Tense and Mood) are prevented from appearing by pragmatic mechanisms such as competition between weaker and stronger forms and the Gricean Principle of Manner.KeywordsConditionalsBiscuit conditionalsCounterfactualMoodTenseFake tenseSequence of tenseDouble accessPragmatic competitionPrinciple of Manner
This article discusses the semantics of tense morphemes in Japanese in temporal adverbial clauses as well as in relative clauses. We claim that they are non-pronominal higher order entities but do not carry existential quantifier meanings on their own. Specifically, we argue against the view that Japanese past tense sentences are necessarily existentially quantifying and that this is the reason why they cannot occur as mae ‘before’ clauses. This view is incompatible with the fact that Japanese ato ‘after’ clauses must occur in the past tense. By contrast, our own proposal about Japanese tense morphemes is based on the idea that the inherent meaning of ‘before’ (or ‘after’) agrees with the “relative” meaning of the tense morpheme in the temporal adverbial clause. That is, a ‘before’ clause must be in the future tense (conveyed by the non-past tense form) because it describes a situation that follows the matrix predication time, whereas an ‘after’ clause must be in the past tense because it describes a situation that precedes the matrix predication time. Choosing the wrong tense form would then result in a contradiction. We will make two separate compositional proposals within two major accounts of ‘before’ and ‘after’: Beaver and Condoravdi’s and Anscombe’s. This enables us to show that correct empirical predictions can be made about ‘before’ and ‘after’ clauses, including non-veridical ‘before’ clauses, regardless of which account of temporal connectives turns out to be optimal. Our proposal also covers ‘when’ clauses and (nominal) relative clauses. Japanese tense morphemes are higher order entities and are “quantifier-raised” to yield “simultaneous readings” for present tense relative clauses. From the viewpoint of natural language semantic theory, this article establishes that non-pronominal relative tense morphemes are not always existentially quantifying. When an existential quantifier interpretation is needed, it is supplied through independent means. This is a promising approach to the semantics of relative-tense languages such as Japanese.
Linguistics and philosophy, while being two closely-related fields, are often approached with very different methodologies and frameworks. Bringing together a team of interdisciplinary scholars, this pioneering book provides examples of how conversations between the two disciplines can lead to exciting developments in both fields, from both a historical and a current perspective. It identifies a number of key phenomena at the cutting edge of research within both fields, such as reporting and ascribing, describing and referring, narrating and structuring, locating in time and space, typologizing and ontologizing, determining and questioning, arguing and rejecting, and implying and (pre-)supposing. Each chapter takes on a phenomena and explores it through a set of questions which are posed and answered at the outset of each chapter. An accessible and engaging resource, it is essential reading for researchers and students in both disciplines, and will empower exciting and illuminating conversations for years to come.
Linguistics and philosophy, while being two closely-related fields, are often approached with very different methodologies and frameworks. Bringing together a team of interdisciplinary scholars, this pioneering book provides examples of how conversations between the two disciplines can lead to exciting developments in both fields, from both a historical and a current perspective. It identifies a number of key phenomena at the cutting edge of research within both fields, such as reporting and ascribing, describing and referring, narrating and structuring, locating in time and space, typologizing and ontologizing, determining and questioning, arguing and rejecting, and implying and (pre-)supposing. Each chapter takes on a phenomena and explores it through a set of questions which are posed and answered at the outset of each chapter. An accessible and engaging resource, it is essential reading for researchers and students in both disciplines, and will empower exciting and illuminating conversations for years to come.
Linguistics and philosophy, while being two closely-related fields, are often approached with very different methodologies and frameworks. Bringing together a team of interdisciplinary scholars, this pioneering book provides examples of how conversations between the two disciplines can lead to exciting developments in both fields, from both a historical and a current perspective. It identifies a number of key phenomena at the cutting edge of research within both fields, such as reporting and ascribing, describing and referring, narrating and structuring, locating in time and space, typologizing and ontologizing, determining and questioning, arguing and rejecting, and implying and (pre-)supposing. Each chapter takes on a phenomena and explores it through a set of questions which are posed and answered at the outset of each chapter. An accessible and engaging resource, it is essential reading for researchers and students in both disciplines, and will empower exciting and illuminating conversations for years to come.
Linguistics and philosophy, while being two closely-related fields, are often approached with very different methodologies and frameworks. Bringing together a team of interdisciplinary scholars, this pioneering book provides examples of how conversations between the two disciplines can lead to exciting developments in both fields, from both a historical and a current perspective. It identifies a number of key phenomena at the cutting edge of research within both fields, such as reporting and ascribing, describing and referring, narrating and structuring, locating in time and space, typologizing and ontologizing, determining and questioning, arguing and rejecting, and implying and (pre-)supposing. Each chapter takes on a phenomena and explores it through a set of questions which are posed and answered at the outset of each chapter. An accessible and engaging resource, it is essential reading for researchers and students in both disciplines, and will empower exciting and illuminating conversations for years to come.
Linguistics and philosophy, while being two closely-related fields, are often approached with very different methodologies and frameworks. Bringing together a team of interdisciplinary scholars, this pioneering book provides examples of how conversations between the two disciplines can lead to exciting developments in both fields, from both a historical and a current perspective. It identifies a number of key phenomena at the cutting edge of research within both fields, such as reporting and ascribing, describing and referring, narrating and structuring, locating in time and space, typologizing and ontologizing, determining and questioning, arguing and rejecting, and implying and (pre-)supposing. Each chapter takes on a phenomena and explores it through a set of questions which are posed and answered at the outset of each chapter. An accessible and engaging resource, it is essential reading for researchers and students in both disciplines, and will empower exciting and illuminating conversations for years to come.
Linguistics and philosophy, while being two closely-related fields, are often approached with very different methodologies and frameworks. Bringing together a team of interdisciplinary scholars, this pioneering book provides examples of how conversations between the two disciplines can lead to exciting developments in both fields, from both a historical and a current perspective. It identifies a number of key phenomena at the cutting edge of research within both fields, such as reporting and ascribing, describing and referring, narrating and structuring, locating in time and space, typologizing and ontologizing, determining and questioning, arguing and rejecting, and implying and (pre-)supposing. Each chapter takes on a phenomena and explores it through a set of questions which are posed and answered at the outset of each chapter. An accessible and engaging resource, it is essential reading for researchers and students in both disciplines, and will empower exciting and illuminating conversations for years to come.
In seminal work, Potts (2005) claimed that the behavior of “supplements”—appositive relative clauses (ARCs) and nominals—offers a powerful argument in favor of a multidimensional semantics, one in which certain expressions fail to interact scopally with various operators because their meaning is located in a new semantic dimension. Focusing on ARCs, with data from English, French, and German (Poschmann 2018), I explore an alternative to Potts’s bidimensional account in which (a) appositives may be syntactically attached with matrix scope, despite their appearance in embedded positions, as in McCawley 1981; (b) contra McCawley, they may also be syntactically attached within the scope of other operators, in which case they semantically interact with them; (c) they are semantically conjoined with the rest of the sentence, but (d) they give rise to nontrivial projection facts when they do not have matrix scope. In effect, the proposed analysis accounts for most of the complexity of these data by positing a more articulated syntax and pragmatics, while eschewing the use of a new dimension of meaning.
Contexts of the conditional sentences can affect temporal interpretation. Conditional sentences are the sentences which combine two clauses, namely the conditional clause (protasis) and the answer clause (apodosis), and each clause completes meanings of the conditional sentences. This article aims at 1) revealing the temporal features of conditional sentences, based on the semantic aspects of the grammatical verb, namely tenses, aspects and moods, and based on interactions between these aspects; 2) identifying the temporal relations in internal conditional sentences. To achieve this objective, this article uses a descriptive qualitative research method through analyzing the temporal interpretation of conditional sentences in standard Arabic texts as evidence. The results of the study show that the temporal interpretation of conditional sentences is largely determined by the features of the conditional mood and is affected by the interaction of tenses, aspects and moods, while the temporal relations in the internal conditional sentences are divided into independent and dependent relations.
A. Kratzer’s “The Notional Category of Modality” (NCM) develops a unified analysis of modals and conditionals, which has come to be the classic approach to modality in linguistic semantics and beyond. This chapter presents an overview of NCM’s main contributions and clarifies the motivations behind particular analytical choices, concentrating on the role of conversational backgrounds in the theory. It also highlights new research that has enriched the framework or raised outstanding issues.KeywordsModalityConditionalsPremise semanticsContext dependenceConversational backgroundModal baseOrdering source
This chapter provides an overview of Dorit Abusch’s 1997 paper “Sequence of tense and temporal de re”, reporting both on the ideas presented in the paper and its influence in the field. The paper has had a lasting impact, both in in terms of its interaction with literature at the time of publication, and in terms of how it continues to shape our debates today. The chapter aims to elucidate that by tracing how various aspects of Abusch’s paper resurface in later debates.KeywordsSequence of tenseSemantics of tenseEmbedded tenseTemporal de re
Double access readingsUpper limit constraintPropositional attitudes
In English, past tense stative clauses embedded under a past-marked attitude verb, like Eric thought that Kalina was sick , can receive two interpretations, differing on when the state of the complement is understood to hold, i.e. Kalina’s sickness precedes the time of Eric’s thinking (backward-shifted reading), or Kalina is sick at the time of Eric’s thinking (simultaneous reading). As is well known, the availability of the simultaneous reading—also called Sequence of tense (SOT)—is subject to cross-linguistic variation. Non-SOT languages only allow for the backward-shifted interpretation. This cross-linguistic variation has been analysed in two main ways in the literature: a structural approach, connecting the availability of the simultaneous reading in a language to a syntactic mechanism that allows the embedded past not to be interpreted; and an implicature approach, which links the absence of such a reading to the presence of a “cessation” implicature associated with past tense. We report a series of experiments on Polish, which is commonly classified as a non-SOT language. First, we investigate the interpretation of complement clauses embedded under past-marked attitude verbs in Polish and English. This investigation revealed a difference between these two languages in the availability of simultaneous interpretations for past-under-past complement clauses, albeit not as large as a binary distinction between SOT and non-SOT languages would lead us to expect. We then address the question of whether the lower acceptability we observe for simultaneous readings in Polish might be due to an embedded cessation implicature. On the way to address this question, we show that in simple matrix clauses, Polish gives rise to the same cessation inference as English. Then we investigate Polish past-under-past sentences in positive and negative contexts, comparing their potential cessation implicature to the exclusive implicature of disjunction. In our results, we found that the latter was endorsed more often in positive than in negative contexts, as expected, while the cessation implicature was endorsed overall very little, with no difference across contexts. The disanalogy between the disjunction and the temporal cases, and the insensitivity of the latter to monotonicity, are a challenge for the implicature approach, and cast doubts on associating SOT phenomena with implicatures.
This book contains 15 papers by the influential American philosopher, David Lewis. All previously published (between 1966 and 80), these papers are divided into three groups: ontology, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. Lewis supplements eight of the fifteen papers with postscripts in which he amends claims, answers objections, and introduces later reflections. Topics discussed include possible worlds, counterpart theory, modality, personal identity, radical interpretation, language, propositional attitudes, the mind, and intensional semantics. Among the positions Lewis defends are modal realism, materialism, socially contextualized formal semantics, and functionalism of the mind. The volume begins with an introduction in which Lewis discusses his philosophical method.
The truth of my claim: ‘It is raining’ depends on the time at which I made it. It was true if and only if it was indeed raining (in my vicinity) at that time. Similarly my assertion ‘it has been raining’, made at time t, is true if there was a time t′ preceding t such that it rained at t′.
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I might summarize this section by saying that the English tenses, according to this analysis, form quite a motley group. PAST, PRES and FUT serve to relate reference time to speech time, while WOULD and USED-TO behave like Priorian operators, shifting the point of evaluation away from the reference time. HAVE also shifts the point of evaluation away from the reference time, but in a more complicated way. And FUT, in contrast to PRES and PAST, is a substitution operator, putting the reference time of its clause in the plate of the speech time of subordinate clauses.
The only obligatory temporal expression in English is tense, yet Hans Reichenbach (1947) has argued convincingly that the simplest sentence is understood in terms of three temporal notions. Additional possibilities for a simple sentence are limited: English sentences have one time adverbial each. It is not immediately clear how to resolve these matters, that is, how (if at all) Reichenbach's account can be reconciled with the facts of English. This paper attempts to show that they can be reconciled, and presents an analysis of temporal specification that is based directly on Reichenbach's account.
Part I is devoted to a study of the way the three times—speech time, reference time, event time—are realized and interpreted. The relevant syntactic structures and their interaction and interpretation are examined in detail. Part II discusses how a grammar should deal with time specification, and proposes a set of interpretive rules. The study offers an analysis of simple sentences, sentences with complements, and habitual sentences. It is shown that tense and adverbials function differently, depending on the structure in which they appear. The temporal system is relational: the orientation and values of temporal expressions are not fixed, but their relational values are consistent. This consistency allows the statement of principles of interpretation.
An interesting result of the study is that the domain of temporal specification is shown to be larger than a sentence. Sentences that are independent syntactically may be dependent on other sentences for a complete temporal interpretation; complements may be dependent on sentences other than their matrix sentences. Time adverbials and tense may be shared, in the sense that a temporal expression in one sentence may contribute to the interpretation of another sentence. These facts have important consequences: only a grammar with surface structure interpretation rules can account for temporal specification in a unified manner, because more than one sentence may be involved. Context is thus shown to be crucial for the temporal interpretation of sentences.
This paper describes a compositional semantics for temporal expressions as part of the meaning representation language (MRL) of the JANUS system, a natural language understanding and generation system under joint development by BBN Labs and ISI. The analysis is based on a higher-order intensional logic described in detail in Hinrichs (1987a). Temporal expressions of English are translated into this language as quantifiers over times that bind temporal indices on predicates. The semantic evaluation of time-dependent predicates is defined relative to a set of discourse contexts, which, following Reichenbach (1947), include the parameters of speech time and reference time. The resulting context-dependent and multi-indexed interpretation of temporal expressions solves a set of well-known problems that arise when traditional systems of tense logic are applied to natural language semantics
This paper is mainly concerned with tense in embedded constructions. I believe that recent research -- notably the work by Ogihara (1989) and Abusch (1993) -- has contributed much to our better understanding of its semantics. The proposals made by the two authors are, however, still too simplistic in some regards. Among other things, they neglect the interplay of tense with temporal adverbs of quantification and with frame-setters. To get this composition right is a touchstone for every theory of tense and tense semanticists have been concerned with this problem from the beginning on, as witnessed by the analyses in Kratzer (1978), Bäuerle (1979), Dowty (1979/1982), to mention a few. The claim I want to stress in this article is that in complements of attitudes, we can never have a "referential" tense, i.e., an absolute or anaphorical tense. Every tense occurring there will turn out to be a bound tense. I think this claim is implicit in Ogihara's (1989) analysis, and it is made explicit in Abusch's (1993) approach. The composition of bound tense with the two kinds of adverbs mentioned will require rather elaborate techniques and I am not sure whether I have been entirely successful, but I hope that the solution is basically correct.
The Syntax and Semantics of Temporal Expressions in English
- C Smith
Attitude De Dicto and De Se
- D Lewis
Sequence of Tense Revisited: Two Semantic Accounts of Tense in Intensional Contexts Ellipsis, Tense and Questions, Dyana-2 Esprit Basic research Project 6852, Deliverable R2.2.B. Shorter version appeared in
- D Abusch
- D Abusch
Temporal Reference in English and Japanese
- T Ogihara
Propositional Objects
- W V O Quine