Perfects and the semantics/pragmatics interface (original) (raw)
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Brands of Perfects: Semantics and Pragmatics
2006
This paper aims at proposing a detailed account of the semantics and pragmatics of perfects (and in particular of the French passé composé) within the SDRT framework. We take this framework to be the ideal candidate for dealing with such issues resorting to the semantics/pragmatics interface.
A sentence in the Resultative perfect licenses two inferences: (a) the occurrence of an event (b) the state caused by this event obtains at evaluation time. In this paper I show that this use of the perfect is subject to a large number of distributional restrictions that all serve to highlight the result inference at the expense of the event inference. Nevertheless, only the event inference determines the truth conditions of this use of the perfect, the result inference being a unique type of conventional implicature. I argue furthermore that, since the result state is singular, the event that causes it must also be singular, whereas the Experiential perfect is purely quantificational. But in out-of-the-blue contexts the past tense is also normally interpreted as singular. This leads to a certain amount of competition between the Resultative perfect and the past tense, and it is this competition, I suggest, that maintains the conventional (non-truth conditional) result state inference.
The Oxford Handbook of Tense and Aspect
2012
when discussing theories of the perfect. In section 3, we investigate in more detail theories of the perfect focusing on semantic characteristics, bearing in mind that most of the discussions have revolved around perfects in European languages (Germanic and Romance). In section 4, we discuss accounts of how pragmatic factors and discourse relations aff ect the use of the perfect, and in section 5, we conclude by examining the place of a perfect in a tense/aspect system more generally, considering how it relates to categories such as the resultative and the simple past, and also to the habitual and the prospective.
Italian Journal of Linguistics, 2017
The grammatical category of perfective (PFV) aspect is a highly heterogeneous category, both in terms of its expression and the ways in which it is semantically delimited in natural languages. I will examine two common perspectives on a uniform semantic analysis of PFV aspect, namely, what are dubbed here a CULMINATION perspective and a QUANTIZATION perspective. The former focuses on endpoints and results, while the latter, here recast in mereological terms, relates to the notion of 'a single event seen as an unanalysed whole'. I will show that they are neither necessary nor sufficient, jointly or individually, to characterize the meaning of PFV aspect in natural languages. I will then outline a new proposal that allows us to do justice to the variety of interpretations associated with PFV forms, while at the same time identifying their shared meaning component. The proposal advocated here is that all PFV forms uniformly introduce a maximization operator MAX E on events (originally proposed by Filip and Rothstein 2005). There is a typology of MAX E operators in natural languages, all of which share the requirement of selecting the maximal STAGE (Landman 1992, 2008) of a certain eventuality type P leading to the most informative proposition in a given context; they differ, however, with respect to whether the maximal stage requirement is satisfied when stages of P-eventuality (a) culminate with respect to the culmination condition inherent in P, or (b) cease to develop at some contextually determined stage. One of the consequences of this proposal is that Landman's (1992, 2008) 'stage-of ' relation does not only underlie the semantics of the English PROG, for which it was originally proposed, but also the semantics of PFV in typologically distinct languages. Moreover, in so far as MAX E yields what counts as one individuated event at a particular context, PFV turns out to be a grammatical category that is tied to one of our most basic cognitive abilities, namely out ability to individuate entities as singular discrete units.
Introduction: The In(ter)dependence of event structure, aspect and tense
Lingua, 2008
The rationale for bringing together work on tense, aspect and event structure is discussed. Papers by Gehrke, Ramchand, Zagona, Basilico, Van Hout, Guéron and Demirdache and Uribe-Etxebarria are described, and the connections and disparities between them considered. # Over the past 15 years, generative linguists have devoted intensive study to the syntax and semantics of event structure, making considerable progress in the syntactic of fundamental notions such as state, activity, achievement, accomplishment and semelfactive, and significantly elucidating the relationship between these analyses and verbal semantics, including event decomposition and theta-role assignment. A fairly coherent picture of vP-internal syntax and semantics has emerged in the work of such investigators as Ramchand, van Hout, Borer, Basilico, and the present authors, among many others.
Toward the logic of tense and aspect in English
1978
Much of the recent work in linguistics has focused on the problem of giving a precise syntax for English. There is now an increasing awareness of the need for some kind of semantic theory. Some recent work of the logician Richard Montague has great promise in this regard. Montague's main goal was to give a completely successful analysis of logical consequence for ordinary language. He approached this end by giving such an analysis for what may be regarded as limited portions of English, or fragments of English. A fragment is a formal language in that it has a rigorous syntax and a model-theoretic semantics. The semantics provides a characterization of the notions of a true sentence (under a given interpretation) and of logical consequence. There are three papers by Montague where he presents such fragments: Montague [3], Montague [4], and Montague [6]. (Henceforth, we shall refer to these papers as EFL, UG, and PTQ, respectively.)