The next ComSyn meeting will take place on Thursday 8 November.
Speaker: Daniel Altschuler (Heinrich Heine Univesität, Düsseldorf)
Title: ‘Sequence of tense’ as absence of cessation
Time: 15:15-16:30
Venue: Vrieshof 4 / 012
Abstract
It has become generally accepted in the research on the syntax-semantics interface that some features (e.g. person/number/tense) on bound-variables are not semantically interpreted; they are there for purely syntactic reasons (e.g. agreement). Such a view is adopted in the tense domain due to the so-called sequence of tense phenomenon; a syntactic feature manipulation mechanism (e.g. feature checking or feature transmission) is posited to render a bound past tense semantically inert, i.e. without an anteriority meaning. The arguments for the sequence of tense analysis that we are familiar with rely on an unstated assumption that states have first moments. In this talk I argue that if this assumption is not made, or if is semantically neutralized, we can and should maintain the view that tense features are always interpreted. The outline of the talk is as follows. I first motivate a constraint that correlates the holding of a state at an interval with the truth of a stative predicate at a moment within that interval. The corollary of this constraint is that if a stative predicate holds of a moment, it necessarily holds of a preceding moment, regardless of whether or not the described state has a first moment. I then show how this corollary underwrites the entailment from PRES-ϕ to PAST-ϕ and use this fact to derive a cessation implicature: the utterance of PAST-ϕ implicates that no state of the kind described currently holds. The proposed analysis makes use of an existential quantifier for tense with a domain restriction variable over reference time concepts. The presence of a cessation implicature is predicted in both matrix and embedded clauses when the reference time concept does not—by itself—make PRES-ϕ false. I suggest that the intuitions often used to motivate the sequence of tense analysis are really intuitions about the absence of the cessation implicature.