Mismatching PRs describe event kinds (original) (raw)

Event Kinds and the Pseudo-Relative

Proceedings of NELS 46, Brandon Prickett and Christopher Hammerly (Eds.)

Pseudo Relatives (PRs) are finite constructions found in many Romance languages that look superficially like nouns modified by appositive relative clauses but actually describe events. Typically, the tense of the PR must semantically “match” the matrix tense, and this was thought to be obligatory (Radford 1977, Guasti 1988 a.o.). In Moulton and Grillo (2015), we showed that PRs are referential descriptions of present or past events, and we argued that a null Determiner heading the PR is responsible for this referentiality. Simultaneity conditions on direct perception, then, force tense “matching.” There are, however, previously unobserved cases of “mismatch” with present under perfect (see Casalicchio 2015, for other cases of mismatch). This combination also gives rise to direct perception, but it is only available in Italian and not in other languages that have PRs (e.g. French, Spanish, or Greek). In this paper, we argue that such “tense mismatch” (TMM) PRs refer to Event Kinds (Portner 1991, Carlson 2003, Gehrke to appear, and references cited therein). We show that the propositions within TMM-PRs are habituals, and that via a null determiner, the PR as a whole comes to denote an event kind described by the habitual (e.g. Ferreira 2005). We first demonstrate this with TMM-PRs that combine with kind-taking predicates, and then show that TMM-PRs combine with direct perception verbs by Derived Kind Predication (Chierchia 1998), which accounts for various differences in scope and interpretation between “tense matching” PRs (TM-PRs) and TMM-PRs. Finally we argue that the kind-based DP-account explains why Italian allows TMM-PRs but other PR languages do not.

'Missed tense' (praesens pro futuro) in Russian matrix clauses: semantic and formal motivation

The paper discusses the phenomenon which I call 'missed tense' or 'praesens pro futuro' and which is observed in the main clause of complex sentences. When the conditional marker esli 'if' introduces an argument clause, a sort of mismatch of TAM marking can be observed between the main and the embedded predicate. If the main predicate is a predicative, the expected future tense can remain unmarked on the matrix predicate. The same is impossible for constructions with a canonical verbal head. I show that the existence of the construction results both from semantic factors (it is observed with evaluation predicates, and a situation can be evaluated even if it has not taken place in reality) and formal factors (copula constructions with predicatives differ in some respects from canonical verbal constructions).

Tense and Aspect in Non-Finite Clauses

1994

Following the analysis of tense developed by Partee (19'13) and En$ (1987). among others, we will claim that in natural languages tense categories have a referentiai character -they denote temporal intervals-and show a syntactic behaviour similar to that of nominal categories. From this point of view, after having commented that the simple past of English stative verbs (and also Romance imperfect) behaves like pronominals and that the simple past of English nou-stative verbs (and aiso Romance preterite) behaves like R-expressions, we focus on the hypothesis that nou-finite clauses have an aspect category with features and phonetic content and a tense category which lacks of both features and phonetic content, as the anaphorpronominal PRO. To explicitate these proposals, we adopt a temporal characterization as formulated by Reichenbach (1947) and a syntactic analysis based on the hypothesis that the functional categories of tense and aspect are heads of maximal projections.

The Syntactic Expression of Tense (2007, Lingua 117.2)

Abstract In this article I defend the view that many central aspects of the semantics of tense are determined by independently-motivated principles of syntactic theory. I begin by decomposing tenses syntactically into a temporal ordering predicate (the true tense, on this approach) and two time-denoting arguments corresponding to covert a reference time (RT) argument and an eventuality time (ET) argument containing the verb phrase.