Syntax-semantics interface for tense and aspect in French

Abstract

This paper proposes an HPSG account of the French tense and aspect system, focussing on the analysis of the passé simple (simple past) and imparfait (imperfective) tenses and their interaction with aspectually sensitive adjuncts. Starting from de Swart's (1998) analysis of the semantics of tense and aspect, I show that while the proposed semantic representations are appropriate, the analysis of implicit aspectual operators as coercion operators is inadequate. The proposed HPSG analysis relies on Minimal Recursion Semantics to relate standard syntactic structures with de Swart-style semantic representations. The analysis has two crucial features: first, it assumes that the semantic contribution of tense originates in the verb's semantic representation, despite the fact that tense can get wide scope over other semantic elements. Second, it allows the occurrence of implicit aspectual operators to be controlled by the verb's inflectional class, which accounts for their peculiar distribution.