Abstract
The traditional view is that now is a pure indexical, denoting the utterance time. Yet, despite its initial appeal, the view has faced criticism. A range of data reveal now allows for discourse-bound (i.e., anaphoric) uses, and can occur felicitously with the past tense. The reaction to this has typically been to treat now as akin to a true demonstrative, selecting the prominent time supplied by the non-linguistic context or prior discourse. We argue this is doubly mistaken. The first mistake concerns the semantic value of now which is not a time, but a state --- the consequent state of a prominent event. The second is that now is a pure indexical after all, insofar as its interpretation is determined without recourse to extra-linguistic supplementation. Specifically, we argue that any occurrence of now selects the consequent state of the most prominent event, where event-prominence is linguistically maintained through prominence-affecting updates contributed by coherence relations. Our analysis accounts straightforwardly for a wide range of discourse initial and discourse bound uses of now while giving it a simple indexical meaning. EARLY ACCESS
Highlights
The traditional view is that ‘now’ is a pure indexical, denoting the utterance time
‘Now’ has traditionally been analyzed as a pure indexical: given a context it automatically selects the utterance time.1. This is for a good reason: the data below — which fueled Kamp’s seminal work on double indexing — suggest that ‘now’ selects the utterance time even when other times are introduced by that very utterance (Kamp 1971)
We model prominence by including the prominence ordering of times as potential candidates for temporal anaphora
Summary
‘Now’ has traditionally been analyzed as a pure indexical: given a context it automatically selects the utterance time. This is for a good reason: the data below — which fueled Kamp’s seminal work on double indexing — suggest that ‘now’ selects the utterance time even when other times are introduced by that very utterance (Kamp 1971). Given the right set-up, ‘now’ can fail to select the utterance time; it allows for anaphoric (i.e., discourse-bound) uses (Dry 1979, Kamp & Rohrer 1983, Kamp & Reyle 1993, inter alia) It turns out ‘now’ most frequently occurs with the past tense in English (Lee 2010); for instance:. Since the state of the (relevant parameter of) context at any point in the discourse is determined by the grammatical contribution of coherence relations, the interpretation of ‘now’ is solely determined by linguistic means. It is in this sense, we submit, that ‘now’ behaves as a pure indexical.. Past-tensed uses of ‘now’ (§3.2.1) as well as discourse-initial (including deictic) uses of ‘now’ (§3.2.2). (We provide a fragment and some worked out examples in the Appendix (§5).) In §4, we conclude by summarizing our main contributions
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