The ‘experiential’ as an existential past

Chen, Sihwei; Klok, Jozina Madolyn Vander; Matthewson, Lisa; Rullmann, Hotze

doi:10.1007/s11049-020-09488-6

Cited by 7 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 78 publications

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“…But if what is interpreted is the set of features from which the syntactic representation is composed-the same features that are ultimately interpreted-then a semantic analysis of tense must grapple seriously with the possibility that the interpretation of tense may vary considerably across languages, either in the organization of features that encode tense, or in the precise interpretation of those features. Ogihara and Sharvit (2012), for example, have proposed that languages may vary in terms of whether they exhibit pronominal or quantificational tense, while Chen et al (2020) have argued further that a single language may exhibit both pronominal and quantificational tenses. Pancheva and Zubizarreta (2020) argue that some morphologically tenseless languages, specifically Paraguayan Guaraní, are entirely semantically tenseless, with the temporal interpretation of a clause arising entirely from viewpoint aspect.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Some structural disanalogies between pronouns and tenses

Bjorkman

2022

Can. J. Linguist.

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A pronominal analysis of tense goes back to Partee (1973), motivated by a series of proposed parallels between the interpretation of tenses and that of pronouns. This article revisits Partee's interpretive parallels, as well as two more identified in Kratzer (1998), in light of subsequent developments in work on both temporal relations and on pronouns. The goal of this article is not to argue for or against a pronominal analysis of tense, but instead to make clearer the syntactic and semantic space within which such an analysis is situated, especially given that pronouns have been given increasingly complex syntactic representations even as tense has remained syntactically simplex.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Some structural disanalogies between pronouns and tenses

Bjorkman

2022

Can. J. Linguist.

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No tense: temporality in the grammar of Paraguayan Guarani

Pancheva

Zubizarreta

2023

Linguist and Philos

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Sequence of tense and cessation implicatures: evidence from Polish

Mucha

Renans

Romoli

2022

Nat Lang Linguist Theory

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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.

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The ‘experiential’ as an existential past

Cited by 7 publications

References 78 publications

Some structural disanalogies between pronouns and tenses

Some structural disanalogies between pronouns and tenses

No tense: temporality in the grammar of Paraguayan Guarani

Sequence of tense and cessation implicatures: evidence from Polish

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