Temporal Adjuncts Research Articles

Habitual sentences with <em>costumar</em> ‘use to’: Issues of tense and interaction with frequentative adjuncts

This paper analyses the expression of habitual values in Portuguese, focusing on the auxiliary verb costumar ‘use to’. First, the concept of habituality (and its distinction from genericity, frequentativity, and iterativity) is discussed, and an overview of the various ways of signalling habituality in Portuguese is provided. Then, three topics take centre stage, one concerning tense and two concerning the interaction of costumar with temporal adjuncts of different types. With regard to tense, the versatility of the imperfective past of costumar is examined, noting that this tense form can convey values which are typically reserved to the perfective past and the pluperfect. Regarding the interaction with adjuncts, the combination of costumar with adjuncts that redundantly express habituality (e.g., habitualmente ‘usually’) is first addressed. Subsequently, the combination of costumar with a set of allied adjuncts, grouped under the cover term ‘frequentative’, is scrutinized. These include adjuncts that indicate whether exceptions to the habitual pattern are more or less frequent (e.g., muitas vezes ‘often’ vs. às vezes ‘sometimes’), and adjuncts expressing correlation between eventualities, frequency sensu stricto, or cyclicity (e.g., uma vez por semana ‘once a week’). Portuguese is systematically compared with English throughout the text. The neo-Reichenbachian framework of Discourse Representation Theory (Hans Kamp) is used for formal analyses.

Până-PPs and Complex Event Constructions in Romanian

"Până-PPs and Complex Event Constructions in Romanian. This paper examines the syntactic and semantic status of Romanian PPs headed by the morphologically complex prepositions până în/la ʻuntil/as far as/up to in/at’ in VPs of change of location (a pluti până în peșteră ʻfloat up to the caveʼ) and change of state (a munci până la epuizare ʻwork to the point of exhaustionʼ). Contrary to the claims made in the literature (Barbu 2015), the approach taken here argues that these – and other similar – VPs cannot be considered complex event constructions such as goal-of-motion structures and strong resultative constructions, respectively. The discussion revolves around the interpretation of the entire VP, the lack of any type of restriction on the syntactic and semantic classification of the verb, the violation of the Direct Object Restriction, as well as the borderline between these PPs and temporal adjuncts. These properties highlight the fact that the availability of such VPs does not turn Romanian into a satellite-framed language as they are not real counterexamples to the Talmian generalization according to which verb-framed Romanian disallows these two complex event constructions. Keywords: goal-of-motion structure, resultative construction, VP, până-PP, Romanian "

Clausal Adjuncts of Romance Languages. A Corpus-driven Comparison

"Clausal Adjuncts of Romance Languages – a Corpus-Driven Comparison. Continuing the traditional comparative analysis of Romance languages, the present paper brings evidence for the fact that the syntactic configuration (the word order) of a Romance complex sentence (henceforth CS) with clausal adjuncts is the result of many competing forces. The analysis is based on an original media discourse corpus, collected from three Romance varieties (Romanian, Italian, and French), and the focus will be both on the word order of the temporal, causal, and concessive adjuncts (their occurrence in sentence-initial, in sentence-final position, sometimes even in sentence-middle position), and on the comparative analysis of the results. What I intend to prove is that the ordering of a CS in the three Romance languages is motivated by three types of factors: discourse pragmatics, semantics, and parsing. Keywords: clausal adjuncts, morphosyntactic analysis, word order, Romance languages "

Particularidades semânticas das expressões temporais com até e desafios de tradução entre português e inglês

This paper addresses the semantic analysis of Portuguese temporal adjuncts headed by the polyvalent connective até and its English – also polyvalent – counterparts (chiefly, until and by), and discusses problems in translation between English and Portuguese, documented in the website linguee.com. Curious data obtained in machine translation services (Google Translate [GT], Systran Translate [ST] and DeepL Translator [DT]) is also briefly discussed. The semantic values under discussion include two modes of temporal location (durative and inclusive, the latter often marked by Portuguese até-phrases, but not by their prototypical counterparts, until-phrases), and a combination of temporal location with (explicit) quantification over eventualities. A seldom discussed discourse connective, até que, not exclusively temporal in meaning, is also explored, to a certain extent. The long-debated issue of the English construction not...until is revisited: a comparison with Portuguese data shows that this form of until does not have até as its perfect counterpart. The semantic analysis is made with the logic of the Discourse Representation Theory, elaborating on my previous work (Móia 1995, 2000, 2015, 2016).

Alguns adjuntos temporais com especial relevância para a tradução inglês-português: o caso de since-desde e expressões afins

This paper addresses the semantic analysis of polyvalent temporal adjuncts headed by (mainly) English since and Portuguese desde, and problems in translation from English to Portuguese. Four semantic values of the single operator since are considered (the second and fourth of which are not normally considered autonomously in the English literature) – durative location, derived durative location (in association with adjunct-triggered Aktionsart shift), simple inclusive location and temporal circumscription of quantification. Furthermore, the typically monovalent phrase ever since and the bivalent phrase long since are also taken into account. The fact the Portuguese desde – contrary to English since – is not normally associated with simple inclusive locations is the source of many translation problems. Other interesting grammatical issues, involving long since, are also addressed. The translation data is obtained from the website linguee.com (where six different types of problems are found), and the semantic analysis is made with the logic of the Discourse Representation Theory, elaborating on my previous work, Móia (2000).

Icelandic V3 orders with temporal adjuncts

Although Icelandic is a verb second language (V2), it sometimes allows for V3 orders. In this paper, I focus on a type of Icelandic V3 which consists of an adverbial adjunct occurring in front of wh-questions and present the results of a pilot study that investigated the effects of the length of prosodic break and clause type in relation to V3 structures. Participants were presented with an adverbial clause sandwiched between two sentences (A and B), of which the latter varied between a wh-question and a subject-initial sentence. The breaks between the adverbial and the sentences varied in length. The task was to judge which sentence (A or B) was longer, with the response reflecting which sentence the adverbial clause was parsed with. The results indicate that both the clause type of the B sentence and the length of the prosodic break between the adverbial and the B sentence had a significant effect on how the sentences were parsed.

On Content Uniformity for Beliefs and Desires

The view that dominates the literature on intentional attitudes holds that beliefs and desires both have propositional content. A commitment to what I call “content uniformity” underlies this view. According to content uniformity, beliefs and desires are but different psychological modes having a uniform kind of content. Prima facie, the modes don’t place any constraint on the kinds of content the attitude can have. I challenge this consensus by pointing out an asymmetry between belief contents and desire contents which shows content uniformity to be mistaken. I do this by revisiting the arguments of Richard (Philosophical Studies, 39(1): 1–13, 1981), and show that arguments which purport to show the temporal specificity of belief contents yield the opposite results for desire contents. I defend this preliminary conclusion from various strategies to neutralize the asymmetry claim. My defense provides occasions to respond to objections by Brogaard (2012) and Recanati (2007) to the Richard argument, and to get clearer on the role of temporal adjuncts in desire ascriptions. Finally, I consider whether the construal of attitude content as centered propositions (as in Lewis Philosophical Review, 88(4): 513–543, 1979) can be invoked to vindicate content uniformity. My conclusion is that while the framework itself doesn’t vindicate content uniformity, it could, but only if it availed itself of a further, substantive thesis about desire, which itself is in need of defense.

Os adjuntos temporais na perspectiva da Cartografia Sintática e da Semântica de Eventos

O estudo dos sintagmas adverbiais é um produtivo campo para o desenvolvimento de pesquisas no âmbito da sintaxe a semântica das línguas naturais. Os adjuntos temporais, como “em x tempo” e “por x tempo”, mesmo que já bastante descritos pela literatura, ainda carecem de uma descrição mais aprofundada quando se busca entender de que maneira podem influenciar as possíveis interpretações das sentenças em que estão presentes. Tendo isso em mente, o objetivo principal deste artigo é propor uma análise que, ao considerar a metodologia da Cartografia Sintática e da Semântica de Eventos, capture a contribuição do adjunto temporal – mais especificamente do adjunto “em x tempo” – em sentenças do português brasileiro, bem como, argumentar a favor de uma hipótese segundo a qual os traços dos adjuntos temporais sejam valorados em mais de uma posição da hierarquia universal.

The Role of Inferencing in Semantic/ Pragmatic Cyclicity: the Case of Latin nunc and French or/maintenant

Abstract In this paper, I analyze the evolution of the Latin adverb/discourse marker NUNC and its Old and Modern French equivalents, or and maintenant, markers whose content-level source meanings are in all cases equivalent to English now. The analysis pays particular attention to the role of metonymic inference, and to bridging contexts. Showing that the three etymologically unrelated markers have remarkably similar (but crucially not identical) uses, both as temporal adjuncts and as pragmatic markers of various types, I argue that the diachronic changes undergone by these three items constitute a semantic/pragmatic cycle of a type that I call “onomasiological” (cf. Hansen 2015, fc). I suggest that cyclic developments at the level of semantics and pragmatics take place because source items that are semantically similar will favor similar types of contextual inferences. Furthermore, the fact that the range of uses of the items under consideration is not necessarily exactly identical from one cycle to the next supports an instructional view of semantics, which affords a central role in the process of meaning construction precisely to inferencing.

Temporal/locative inversion in Arabic

AbstractThis research scrutinizes the observation that when the thematic subject is extracted (i.e. questioned) in Jordanian Arabic, temporal/locative inversion may occur. Temporal inversion occurs irrespective of the verb being transitive or intransitive, whereas locative inversion is limited to contexts with an unaccusative verb. This research argues that this distinction correlates with the base-generation of temporal/locative adjuncts; temporal adjuncts are base-generated adjoining to TP, whereas locatives are base-generated adjoining to VP. Temporal but not locative adjuncts resist fronting with VP, demand the use of a tense copula (or a tensed verb), and are not subject to deletion along with the lexical verb. With the assumption that Spec, SubjP must be filled with a non-silent copy due to the effects of the so-called Subject Criterion (Rizzi and Shlonsky 2007), a temporal or locative adjunct, if any, fills this position instead of the extracted thematic subject. Given its low position, a locative adjunct is accessible to Subj0only when there is no v*P, hence the account of the correlation between locative inversion and the type of the verb. Furthermore, this research explores the existence of temporal/locative inversion in other two Arabic dialects (Najdi Arabic and Iraqi Arabic), arguing for a micro-parametric view of this strategy across Arabic dialects.

Motivaciones en conflicto en la posición de adjuntos temporales de secuencia

In this paper, we examine some semantic, syntactic and pragmatic motivations that may influence the preferred order of the Spanish temporal adjuncts antes ‘before’ and después ‘after’, when they function as bare adverbs, as adverbial phrases, and as linkage markers in subordinate clauses. The study of narrative texts reveals that these sequential adjuncts respond differently to each of the motivations under study

Parametric Variation on Missing Tenses in Temporal Adjuncts

The past tense markers cannot appear in the temporal adjuncts of Korean, while they can in those of English. This fact is surprising since it has been argued in the literatures that the so called SOT rule, which deletes past tense at LF, applies to English but not to Korean. I argue in the paper that, interestingly, the missing Tense variation in temporal adjuncts can be captured exactly by the solution for the SOT variation, i.e., Stowell’s (2005) claim that English morphological past ?ed is a non-local PAST polarity item (PPI) but Japanese one (and Korean ?ess, too, I claim) is a local PPI. The true semantic PAST tense, as a polarity licenser for a morphological past, cannot occur within the temporal adjuncts since its PRO reference time argument cannot be controlled due to the intervening temporal argument. This leads to the result that local PPIs, which need to be licensed by the true semantic PAST within temporal adjuncts, cannot appear in temporal adjuncts. On the other hand, non-local PPIs can appear in temporal adjuncts since they can be licensed by the true semantic PAST outside the temporal adjuncts.

Do So Anaphora in English and Korean: With Respect to Depictives, Temporal Adjuncts and ECM Constructions

Do So Anaphora in English and Korean: With Respect to Depictives, Temporal Adjuncts and ECM Constructions

Counterfactual conditionals in focus

This article is a comparative exploration of counterfactual conditionals introduced by the conjunction ‘if’ in French and Norwegian, a topic which has not been studied before. My analyses are based on examples from monolingual and multilingual corpora, complemented by two questionnaires, in French and Norwegian, respectively. Both languages have two main patterns corresponding to (A) [‘if’ + imperfect + conditional simple] and (B) [‘if’ + pluperfect + conditional perfect], but their use is somewhat different in the two languages. Regarding counterfactual present, both have two patterns at their disposal. In French, however, pattern (A) seems preferred whereas Norwegian displays a clear preference for pattern (B). When confronted with examples of counterfactual future, both groups of informants initially hesitated, but ultimately considered pattern (B) as an acceptable solution in many cases. Not only the tenses but also the type of verb, eventual temporal adjuncts and the context are important for the interpretations. Neither French nor Norwegian grammars present the issue satisfactorily and therefore need to be revised.

Future vs. Present in Russian and English Adjunct Clauses

We treat the interpretation and motivate the morphology of tense in adjunct clauses in English and Russian (relative clauses, before/after/when-clauses) with a future matrix verb. The main findings of our paper are the following: 1. English has a simultaneous reading in present adjuncts embedded under will. This follows from our SOT parameter. Russian present adjuncts under budet or the synthetic perfective future can only have a deictic interpretation. 2. The syntax of Russian temporal adjunct clauses (do/posle togo kak…) shows overt parts that had to be stipulated for English as covert in earlier papers. We are thus able to present a neat and straightforward analysis of Russian temporal adjuncts.

‘EM X TEMPO’ E ‘POR X TEMPO’ NO DOMÍNIO TEMPO-ASPECTUAL

Neste artigo, apresentamos uma proposta para a semântica dos adjuntos temporais ‘em X tempo’ e ‘por X tempo’ que não os considera como seletores de eventos. Analisamos o trabalho de Rothstein (2004) como um exemplo de abordagem que chamamos de concepção homo-heterogênea e que considera os adjuntos em questão como contrapartes dessas noções. Mostramos que a proposta de Rothstein não dá conta de todas as sentenças relevantes e leva a resultados incorretos. Nossa análise considera que ‘em X tempo’ pressupõe que o evento ao qual ele se aplica tem um telos e que ‘por X tempo’ insere um ponto de focalização. Desenvolvemos nossa proposta para mostrar que ela dá conta das sentenças relevantes, sem gerar resultados indesejados, e que pode ser naturalmente estendida para explicar tempos futuros e de eventos incrementais.

Complex Sentences in Grammar and Discourse: Essays in Honor of Sandra A. Thompson (review)

Reviewed by: Complex sentences in grammar and discourse: Essays in honor of Sandra A. Thompson ed. by Joan Bybee, and Michael Noonan Edward J. Vajda Complex sentences in grammar and discourse: Essays in honor of Sandra A. Thompson. Ed. by Joan Bybee and Michael Noonan. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2002. Pp. vii, 363. ISBN 1588111172. $110 (Hb). Sandra A. Thompson is widely known for her original contributions to the study of discourse, grammaticalization, and related typological issues. It is therefore fitting that a collection of articles dealing with the functional structure of complex sentences should honor her sixtieth birthday. Written by the honoree’s friends, students, and colleagues—most of [End Page 833] whom have previously co-authored books or articles with her—the thirteen individual studies in this volume span a diverse topical spectrum. All somehow deal with the confluence of grammar and discourse, and many revisit issues investigated jointly by author and honoree in past publications. Several contributions focus specifically on complex sentences. Joan Bybee’s ‘Main clauses are innovative, subordinate clauses are conservative’ (1–18) argues that the relative pragmatic richness of main clauses naturally makes them the focus of new grammaticalization processes and word-order permutations, which, by analogy, may later be introduced to subordinate clauses. John Haiman and Tania Kuteva’s ‘The symmetry of counterfactuals’ (101–25) investigates crosslinguistic patterns of synonymy between habitual and counterfactual verb forms. Carol Lord’s ‘Are subordinate clauses more difficult?’ (223–34) examines the cognitive processing of complex sentences in mathematics word problems. In ‘Combining clauses into clause complexes: A multi-faceted view’ (235–321), by far the volume’s longest article, Christian M. I. M. Matthiessen explores the complex sentence from a larger discourse vantage. Emanuel A. Schegloff’s contribution, entitled ‘Overwrought utterances: “Complex sentences” in a different sense’ (321–36), deals with pragmatic rather than grammatical complexity; it examines the means used by speakers to signal failure in understanding their interlocutor. Two articles provide solutions to grammatical problems in specific languages. Bernard Comrie’s ‘Participles in Tsez’ (19–30) demonstrates that Tsez (Nakh-Dagestanian) lacks a formally definable class of participles, with some deverbal modifiers representing adjectives, others pronominals. Pelin Hennesy and Talmy Givón’s ‘Note on the grammar of Turkish nominalizations’ (125–45) succeeds in uncovering a clear functional difference between the suffixes -mek and -me, previously regarded as synonymous means of nominalizing subordinate clauses in Turkish. In a similarly data-rich study entitled ‘Mini-grammars of some time-when expressions in English’ (31–60), Charles J. Fillmore provides an overview of idiosyncrasies in the lexical composition and usage of temporal adjuncts such as some day, in the morning, on that morning but does not offer any explanation for them. Other contributions explore broader issues of cognitive or functional grammatical theory. In ‘Denial and the construction of conversational turns’ (61–78), Cecilia E. Ford argues that the speech action combination of denial plus follow-up correction represents a basic unit of discourse. Barbara Fox’s ‘On the embodied nature of grammar: Embodied being-in-the-world’ (79–100) deals with the mental representation of language. Paul Hopper’s ‘Hendiadys and auxiliation in English’ (145–75) pursues Sandra Thompson’s ideas on the inherent fuzziness between main and subordinate clauses, and between subordination and coordination. Shoichi Iwasaki and Tsuyoshi Ono’s ‘ “Sentence” in spontaneous spoken Japanese discourse’ (175–202) argues for a redefinition of the ‘sentence’ as a fundamental linguistic unit. The topic of one contribution stands apart from the others. In ‘Some issues concerning the origin of language’ (203–22), Charles N. Li speculates that linguistic polygenesis may have occurred but only if the genetic prerequisites for language development were already present in the human population at the time of its dispersal out of Africa. This is a useful and thought-provoking collection. The variety of Sandra A. Thompson’s own publications, provided in an extensive bibliography (337–45), suggests that this Festschrift might easily have been longer. Edward J. Vajda Western Washington University...

Semantic constraints on case assignment in secondary adjectival predicates in Russian

Adjectival secondary predicates can enter into two Case frames in Russian, the agreeing form and the Instrumental. The paper argues that these Case frames go together with two syntactic positions in the clause which are correlated with two different interpretations, the true depictive and the temporally restricted reading, respectively. The availability of the two readings depends on the houndedness of the secondary predicate. Only bounded predicates can enter into both Case frames and only partially non-bounded predicates can appear in the Instrumental. The paper therefore argues that the pertinent two-way SL/IL-contrast is to he replaced by a three-way distinction in terms of boundedness. The paper outlines the syntax and semantics of the true depictive and the temporally restricted interpretation and discusses how adjectival secondary predicates whose salient properties involve a cotemporary interpretation with the matrix predicate and a control relation of an individual argument, differ from temporal adjuncts as well as from non-finite clauses.

As Time Goes by: Tense and Universal Grammar

How do humans acquire, at a very early age and from fragmentary and haphazard data, the complex patterns of their native language? This is the logical problem of language acquisition, and it is the question that directs the search for an innate universal grammar. As Time Goes By extends the search by proposing a theory of natural-language tense that will be responsive to the language-acquisition problem. The core of the theory is a revision of Hans Reichenbach's theory of tense, modified to satisfy a variety of serious objections that have been brought against it. Hornstein shows how Reichenbach's basic ideas can be combined with poverty-of-stimulus considerations to yield a restricted account of possible tense in natural language. The clearly written discussion proceeds step by step from simple observations and principles to far-reaching conclusions involving complex data carefully selected and persuasively presented. The topics covered include adverbial modification, temporal adjuncts, conditionals, and sequence of tense. Throughout, Hornstein focuses on the logical problem of language acquisition, highlighting the importance of explanatory adequacy and the role of syntactic representations in determining intricate properties of semantic interpretation. Norbert Hornstein is Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Maryland.

PLUSKVAMPERFEKAT U SRPSKOM PREVODU ROMANA SORSTALANSÁG IMREA KERTESA

U radu se analizira upotreba pluskvamperfekta u Tišminom prevodu romana Sorstalanság Imrea Kertesa. Iako u mađarskom jeziku ne postoji glagolski oblik koji je formalni ekvivalent srpskom pluskvamperfektu, u prevodu se ovaj glagolski oblik pojavljuje s relativno visokom učestalošću. U radu se ukazuje na one elemente originalnog teksta koji pogoduju upotrebi pluskvamperfekta u prevodu i analizira kontekst u kojem se on realizuje.