Recent Neo-Davidsonian accounts of the semantics of progressive constructions of action verbs reflect an ontological distinction between processes or incomplete events on the one hand, and complete events on the other. This paper has two goals. First, it attempts to show that this putative ontological distinction is beset with problems. The second goal of this paper is to offer the beginnings of a positive proposal that seeks to show how the ontologically austere Davidsonian can account for the truth conditions of (...) progressive constructions without the need for an enriched ontology. (shrink)

Focusing on cases which involve binding into epistemic modals with definite descriptions and quantifiers, I raise some new problems for standard approaches to all of these expressions. The difficulties are resolved in a semantic framework that is dynamic in character. I close with a new class of problems about de re readings within the scope of modals.

Claims concerning processes, claims of the form “x is φing”, have been the subject of renewed interest in recent years in the philosophy of action. However, this interest has frequently limited itself to noting certain formal features such claims have, and has not extended to a discussion of when they are true. This article argues that a claim of the form “x is φing” is true when what is happening with x is such that, if it is not interrupted, a (...) φing will occur. It then applies itself more directly to the case of action, arguing that when “x is φing” describes x's intentional action, it is true iff x is acting from a method she knows to be sufficient to φ, in the sense that if she is not interrupted in carrying out this method, she will φ. I use this criterion to argue that the carbon-copier example Donald Davidson gives in “Intending” fails to refute Elizabeth Anscombe's claim that an agent who is φing intentionally knows that she is, because the agent in Davidson's example is not intentionally making the copies. (shrink)

Many languages have past-and-counterfactuality markers such as English simple past. There have been various attempts to find a common definition for both uses, but I will argue in this paper that they all have problems with ruling out unacceptable interpretations, or accounting for the contrary-to-fact implicature of counterfactual conditionals, or predicting the observed cross-linguistic variation, or a combination thereof. By combining insights from two basic lines of reasoning, I will propose a simple and transparent approach that solves all the observed (...) problems and offers a new understanding of the concept of counterfactuality. (shrink)

The semantics of progressive sentences presents a challenge to linguists and philosophers alike. According to a widely accepted view, the truth-conditions of progressive sentences rely essentially on a notion of inertia. Dowty suggested inertia worlds to implement this “inertia idea” in a formal semantic theory of the progressive. The main thesis of the paper is that the notion of inertia went through a subtle, but crucial change when worlds were replaced by events in Landman and Portner :760–787, 1998), and that (...) this new, event-related concept of inertia results in a possibility-based theory of the progressive. An important case in point in the paper is a proof that, despite its surface structure, the theory presented in Portner does not implement the notion of inertia in Dowty ; rather, it belongs together with Dowty’s earlier, 1977 theory according to which the progressive is a possibility operator. (shrink)

Everyone agrees that we can’t change the past. But what about the future? Though the thought that we can change the future is familiar from popular discourse, it enjoys virtually no support from philosophers, contemporary or otherwise. In this paper, I argue that the thesis that the future is mutable has far more going for it than anyone has yet realized. The view, I hope to show, gains support from the nature of prevention, can provide a new way of responding (...) to arguments for fatalism, can account for the utility of total knowledge of the future, and can help in providing an account of the semantics of the English progressive. On the view developed, the future is mutable in the following sense: perhaps, once, it was true that you would never come to read a paper defending the mutability of the future. And then the future changed. And now you will. (shrink)

Many languages have past-and-counterfactuality markers such as English simple past. There have been various attempts to find a common definition for both uses, but I will argue in this paper that they all have problems with (a) ruling out unacceptable interpretations, or (b) accounting for the contrary-to-fact implicature of counterfactual conditionals, or (c) predicting the observed cross-linguistic variation, or a combination thereof. By combining insights from two basic lines of reasoning, I will propose a simple and transparent approach that solves (...) all the observed problems and offers a new understanding of the concept of counterfactuality. (shrink)

This paper has two goals. The first is to formulate an adequate account of the semantics of the progressive aspect in English: the semantics of Agatha is making a cake, as opposed to Agatha makes a cake. This account presupposes a version of the so-called Aristotelian classification of verbs in English into EVENT, PROCESS and STATE verbs. The second goal of this paper is to refine this classification so as to account for the infamous category switch problem, the problem of (...) how it is that modification of a verb like run by an adverbial like to the store can turn a PROCESS phrase (run) into an EVENT phrase (run to the store). Views discussed include those of Aqvist, Bach, Bennett, Bennett and Partee, Dowry, Montague and Scott, and Vendler. (shrink)

Frege taught us how to understand one form of predication: an atemporal one. There is also a different, temporal form of predication, which I briefly introduce. Accordingly, there are two fundamentally different approaches to time: a reductive one, aiming to account for time in terms of Frege’s atemporal predication, and a non-reductive one, insisting that the temporal form of predication is sui generis, and that time is to be understood in its terms. I do not directly argue for or against (...) reductionism in this paper. Rather, by evaluating the debates on endurantism–perdurantism, A-theory–B-theory, and presentism–eternalism, I argue that these debates, although aiming to be fundamental, largely boil down to mere quarrels between alternative reductive approaches. We should take notice of this fact and reorient ourselves within the debate on time accordingly: the real issue is whether we should reduce or not. I briefly sketch in what sense endurantism, A-theory, and presentism may be developed on a properly anti-reductionist basis. (shrink)

We offer a formal account of the English past tenses. We see the perfect as having reference time at speech time and the preterite as having reference time at event time. We formalize four constraints on reference time, which we bundle together under the term ‘perspective’. Once these constraints are satisfied at the different reference times of the perfect and preterite, the contrasting functions of these tenses are explained. Thus we can account formally for the ‘definiteness effect’ and the ‘lifetime (...) effect’ of the perfect, for the fact that the perfect seems to ‘explain’ something about the present, and that the perfect cannot presuppose a past time point. We explain why perfect and preterite can sometimes be interchangeable, and we offer a solution to the ’present perfect puzzle’. We explain the unacceptability of notorious examples of the perfect such as * Gutenberg has discovered the art of printing . We give greater definition to the familiar notions of ‘current relevance’ and ‘extended now’. (shrink)

This paper contributes to the debate about ‘tenseless languages’ by defending a tensed analysis of a superficially tenseless language. The language investigated is St’át’imcets (Lillooet Salish). I argue that although St’át’imcets lacks overt tense morphology, every finite clause in the language possesses a phonologically covert tense morpheme; this tense morpheme restricts the reference time to being non-future. Future interpretations, as well as ‘past future’ would-readings, are obtained by the combination of covert tense with an operator analogous to Abusch’s (1985) WOLL. (...) I offer St’át’imcets-internal evidence (of a kind not previously adduced) that the WOLL-like operator is modal in nature. It follows from the analysis presented here that there are only two (probably related) differences between St’át’imcets and English in the area of tense. The first is that St’át’imcets lacks tense morphemes which are pronounced. The second is that the St’át’imcets tense morpheme is semantically underspecified compared to English ones. In each of these respects, the St’át’imcets tense morpheme displays similar properties to pronouns, which may be covert and which may fail to distinguish person, number or gender. Along the way, I point out several striking and subtle similarities in the interpretive possibilities of St’át’imcets and English. I suggest that these similarities may reveal non-accidental properties of tense systems in natural language. I conclude with discussion of the implications of the analysis for cross-linguistic variation, learnability and the possible existence of tenseless languages. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Cognitive Linguistics Jahrgang: 27 Heft: 2 Seiten: 181-203.

I offer a novel account of temporal passage. According to this account, time passes in virtue of there being events in progress. I argue that such an account of temporal passage can explain the direction and whoosh of temporal passage. I also consider two prominent accounts of temporal passage and argue that they amount to special versions of the thesis that time passes in virtue of there being events in progress.

Ryle (1949, Chapter V) discusses a range of predicates which in different ways exemplify a property I shall call quasi-duality - they appear to report two actions or events in one predicate. Quasi-duality is the key property of predicates Ryle classed as achievements. Ryle's criteria for classification were not temporal or aspectual, and Vendler's subsequent adoption of the term achievement for the aktionsart of momentary events changes the term - Rylean achievements and Vendlerian achievements are in principle different classes. Nevertheless, (...) I shall argue in this paper that certain kinds of quasi-duality do have aspectual significance. This paper examines a number of quasi-dual predicates which are not generally discussed in the aktionsart literature, including break a promise, miscount, and cure the patient. Two types of quasi-dual predicates are identified and dubbed criterion predicates and causative upshot predicates. It is shown that both types of quasi-dual predicate lack process progressives, despite being durative, and it is argued that the lack of process progressives identifies these predicates as (aspectual) achievements. They are termed durative achievements to distinguish them from canonical, momentary achievements. It is argued that these predicates lack process progressives, and hence are achievements, because they express individual-level predicates on the event argument. A process progressive is stage-level for the event, and hence is incompatible with a predicate which is lexically individual-level for the event. (shrink)

In this article, I propose a semantic account of temporally mismatched past subjunctive counterfactuals. The proposal consists of the following parts. First, I show that in cases of temporal mismatch, [past] cannot be interpreted inside the proposition where it occurs at surface structure. Instead, it must be interpreted as constraining the time argument of the accessibility relation. This has the effect of shifting the time of the evaluation of the conditional to some contextually salient past time. Second, I will propose (...) specific felicity conditions (presuppositions) for subjunctive conditionals and I will argue that there is a strict correspondence between the time of evaluation in the truth conditions of a conditional and the time relevant for the felicity conditions. In other words, if the time relevant for the accessibility relation has been shifted to the past, then the conditional's presupposition will make reference to a past context. On the other hand, if no past is constraining the time argument of the accessibility relation, the conditional's felicity will make reference to the current (main) context. Third, I will argue that the intuition that the antecedent of mismatched counterfactuals is not true is a scalar implicature arising from a competition not between assertions but between presuppositions. Finally, I will investigate the repercussions of my proposal for the general theory of modality. (shrink)

After reviewing some major features of theinteractions between Linguistics and Philosophyin recent years, I suggest that the depth and breadthof current inquiry into semanticshas brought this subject into contact both with questionsof the nature of linguistic competence and with modern andtraditional philosophical study of the nature ofour thoughts, and the problems of metaphysics.I see this development as promising for thefuture of both subjects.

‘Fred must open the door’ concerns Fred’s obligations. This obligative meaning is turned off by adding aspect: ‘Fred must have opened/be opening/have been opening the door’ are one and all epistemic. Why? In a nutshell: obligative ’must’ operates on procedural contents of imperative sentences, epistemic ‘must’ on propositional contents of declarative sentences; and adding aspect converts procedural into propositional content.

Proportional quantification and progressive aspect interact in English in revealing ways. This paper investigates these interactions and draws conclusions about the semantics of the progressive and telicity. In the scope of the progressive, the proportion named by a proportionality quantifier (e.g. most in The software was detecting most errors) must hold in every subevent of the event so described, indicating that a predicate in the scope of the progressive is interpreted as an internally homogeneous activity. Such an activity interpretation is (...) argued to be available for telic predicates (e.g. cross the street) because these receive a partitive interpretation except in combination with a completive operator, which asserts that the event so described has culminated. The obligatoriness of the completive operator in the preterit is shown to parametrically distinguish those languages that show completion entailments in the preterit, e.g. English, from those that do not, e.g. Malagasy, Hindi, and Japanese. (shrink)

This paper discusses the interaction of aspect and modality, and focuses on the puzzling implicative effect that arises when perfective aspect appears on certain modals: perfective somehow seems to force the proposition expressed by the complement of the modal to hold in the actual world, and not merely in some possible world. I show that this puzzling behavior, originally discussed in Bhatt (1999, Covert modality in non-finite contexts) for the ability modal, extends to all modal auxiliaries with a circumstantial modal (...) base (i.e., root modals ), while epistemic interpretations of the same modals are immune to the effect. I propose that implicative readings are contingent on the relative position of the modal w.r.t. aspect: when aspect scopes over the modal (as I argue is the case for root modals), it forces an actual event, thereby yielding an implicative reading. When a modal element scopes over aspect, no actual event is forced. This happens (i) with epistemics, which structurally appear above tense and aspect; (ii) with imperfective on a root modal: imperfective brings in an additional layer of modality, itself responsible for removing the necessity for an actual event. This proposal enables us to solve the puzzle while maintaining a standardized semantics for aspects and modals. (shrink)

Predicates like “coloring‐the‐star” denote events that have a temporal duration and a culmination point (telos). When combined with perfective aspect (e.g., “Valeria has colored the star”), a culmination inference arises implying that the action has stopped, and the star is fully colored. While the perfective aspect is known to constrain the conceptualization of the event as telic, many reading studies have demonstrated that readers do not make early commitments as to whether the event is bounded or unbounded. A few visual‐world (...) studies tested the processing of telic predicates during online sentence processing, demonstrating an early integration of aspectual and temporal cues. By employing the visual‐world paradigm, we tested the incremental processing of the perfective aspect in Italian in two eye‐tracking studies in which listeners heard durative predicates in the perfective form in a scenario showing a completed and a non‐completed event. Differently from previous studies, we compared telic durative predicates such as “coloring‐the‐star” to punctual predicates such as “lighting‐the‐candle.” While for punctual predicates, the inferences of telicity (the event has a telos) and of culmination (the telos is reached) are lexically encoded in the perfective verb, for durative predicates, the degree of event completion (visually encoded) needs to be integrated with perfective aspect (linguistically encoded) for the culmination inference derivation. By modulating the interaction of visual and linguistic stimuli across the two experiments, we show that the verb's perfective aspect triggers the culmination inference incrementally during sentence processing, offering novel evidence for the continuous integration of linguistic processing with real‐world visual information. (shrink)

It is argued that two different types of concept are often intermingled in discussions of Aktionsart. The most common type of classification is one of situation types, relating to the potential actualisation of a situation, although some of the definitions have to do with the actual realization of the situation. This distinction, adequately captured by the notions (a)telicity and (un)boundedness (Declerck 1989), is explored and it is shown how NPs, PPs and tense influence a sentence''s classification as (un)bounded.

This paper offers a new unified theory about the meaning of the imperfective and progressive aspects that builds on earlier of analyses in the literature that treat the imperfective as denoting a universal quantifier (e.g. Bonomi, Linguist Philos, 20(5):469–514, 1997; Cipria and Roberts, Nat Lang Semant 8(4):297–347, 2000). It is shown that the problems associated with such an analysis can be overcome if the domain of the universal quantifier is taken to be a partition of a future extending interval into (...) equimeasured cells. Treating the partition-measure (the length of each partition-cell) as a contextually dependent variable allows for a unified treatment of the habitual and event-in-progress readings of the imperfective. It is argued that the contrast between the imperfective and the progressive has to do with whether the quantifier domain is a regular partition of the reference interval or a superinterval of the reference interval. (shrink)

In recent years, our understanding of how tense systems vary across languages has been greatly advanced by formal semantic study of languages exhibiting fewer tense categories than the three commonly found in European languages. However, it has also often been reported that languages can sometimes distinguish more than three tenses. Such languages appear to have ‘graded tense’ systems, where the tense morphology serves to track how far into the past or future a reported event occurs. This paper presents a formal (...) semantic analysis of the tense-aspect system of Gĩkũyũ , a Northeastern Bantu language of Kenya. Like many languages of the Bantu family, Gĩkũyũ appears to exhibit a graded tense system, wherein four grades of past tense and three grades of future tense are distinguished. I argue that the prefixes traditionally labeled as ‘tenses’ in Gĩkũyũ exhibit important differences from tenses in languages like English. Although, like tenses in English, these ‘temporal remoteness prefixes’ in Gĩkũyũ introduce presuppositions regarding a temporal parameter of the clause, in Gĩkũyũ these presuppositions concern the ‘event time’ of the clause directly, rather than the ‘topic time’. Consequently, the key difference between Gĩkũyũ and languages like English lies not in how many tenses are distinguished, but in whether tense-like features are able to modify other, lower verbal functional projections in the clause. (shrink)

In the accounts we give of one another, claims about our abilities appear to be indispensable. Some abilities are so widespread that many who have them take them for granted, such as the ability to walk, or to write one's name, or to tell a hawk from a handsaw. Others are comparatively rare and notable, such as the ability to hit a Major League fastball, or to compose a symphony, or to tell an elm from a beech. In either case, (...) however, when we ascribe such abilities to one another we have the impression that we are making claims that, whether they are worth saying or not, are at least sometimes true. The impression of truth exerts a pressure towards giving a philosophical theory of ability. It is not an option, at least at the outset, to dismiss all our talk of ability as fiction or outright falsehood. A theory of ability can be reasonably expected to say what it is to have an ability in a way that vindicates the appearance of truth. Such a theory will deserve the name “philosophical” insofar as it gives an account, not of this or that range of abilities, but of abilities generally. (shrink)

The following contribution1 was inspired by Cleo Condoravdi’s article on NPI licensing in temporal clauses (Condoravdi, this volume). Condoravdi gives a coherent and comprehensive account of be- fore which crucially involves coercion of propositions to the earliest or maximal times at which the propositions are true, and a modal component for non-factual interpretations. I argue for a nonmodal, non-coercive analysis of clauses like [A before B] as ‘A is the case when B has not been the case’, triggering a conversational (...) implicature that B will be the case later. I will discuss temporal operators involving measure phrases, like three hours before, and I will show that so-called “expletive” negation in corresponding clauses in German is, in fact, interpreted as negation. (shrink)

Our aim in the present paper is to investigate, from the standpoint of truth-theoretic semantics, English tense, temporal designators and quantifiers, and other expressions we use to relate ourselves and other things to the temporal order. Truth-theoretic semantics provides a particularly illuminating standpoint from which to discuss issues about the semantics of tense, and their relation to thoughts at, and about, times. Tense, and temporal modifiers, contribute systematically to conditions under which sentences we utter are true or false. A Tarski-style (...) truth-theoretic semantics, by requiring explicitly represented truth conditions, helps to sharpen questions about the function of tense, and to deepen our insight into the contribution the tenses and temporal modifiers make to what we say by using them. (shrink)