Abstract
The paper offers a formal account of the discourse behaviour of participles, which to some extent behave like main clauses in having semantically undetermined relations to their matrix clause, but which should nevertheless be integrated into the compositional semantics of complex sentences. The theory is developed on the basis of Ancient Greek participles and offers an account of their syntax, semantics and discourse behaviour (focusing on the temporal dimension of discourse), integrating Lexical-Functional Grammar, Compositional DRT and Segmented DRT using Glue semantics. http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/sp.4.8 BibTeX info
Highlights
In the course of our motivation we present the semantics of tense and aspect that we will use in our account of participles
We see that we correctly get a sequence of events, with each participle providing the reference time for the verb; only the left-most participle interacts with the context, in the sense that its reference time must be anaphorically bound. This is an effect of the Glue logic: after consuming the participles contribution, the independent rheme construction is of the type (T> BADJ∈↓) (T↓ BADJ∈↓): this means it is looking for a sentence meaning (BADJ∈↓) dependent on the topic time of the verb to its right (T>) to produce a sentence meaning dependent on its own topic time (T↓)
We developed our theory on the basis of Ancient Greek, where participles play a important role
Summary
We argued in section 2.2.4 that the three different types of participles are syntactically distinct Each of these constructions has some semantic consequences that are always found with that construction: to repeat the most salient ones, frames introduce anaphoric event discourse referents, frames and independent rhemes always provide the topic time for the verb to their right, and elaborations do not have a separate topic time, but use the matrix event time instead. These properties always hold for a given construction. It would be possible to integrate such inferences in the semantics, since our framework allows for optional semantic resources: but we have followed the principle that only invariant properties of constructions should be encoded in the semantics and the rest left to (discourse) pragmatics.
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