Paraguayan Guarani does not overtly mark tense in its inflectional system. Prior accounts of languages without obligatory morphological tense have posited a phonologically covert lexical tense, or have introduced tense semantics via a rule, in the post-syntactic interpretative component. We offer a more radical approach: Paraguayan Guarani does not have tense at the level of lexical or logical semantics. We propose that evaluation time shift, a mechanism independently attested in the narrative present in languages with (...) tense, is more widely used in Paraguayan Guarani for encoding temporal meaning. The broader consequence of our proposal is that tense is not a linguistic universal. (shrink)

The evolution of Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) is the result of the amount of research in the field of education and artificial intelligence in recent years. English is the third most common languages in the world and also is the internationally dominant in the telecommunications, science and trade, aviation, entertainment, radio and diplomatic language as most of the areas of work now taught in English. Therefore, the demand for learning English has increased. In this paper, we describe the design of (...) an Intelligent Tutoring System for teaching English language grammar to help students learn English grammar easily and smoothly. The system provides all topics of English grammar and generates a series of questions automatically for each topic for the students to solve. The system adapts with all the individual differences of students and begins gradually with students from easier to harder level. The intelligent tutoring system was given to a group of students of all age groups to try it and to see the impact of the system on students. The results showed a good satisfaction of the students toward the system. (shrink)

Stojnić (2021) argues that the content of linguistic utterances is determined by the rules of natural language grammar more stringently than what is generally assumed. She proposes specifically that coherence relations are encoded by the linguistic structures and determine what individuals count as most prominent, thereby serving as the referents of free (“demonstrative”) pronouns. In this paper, I take a close look at the empirical evidence from English and Serbian that she offers in support of this position. Considering these (...) data points in connection with additional linguistic data (also from German and Japanese), I argue that there is no compelling evidence for the assumption that coherence relations directly determine the resolution of pronouns. Instead, grammatical restrictions imposed by different types of pronouns and tenses have a larger impact on the meaning conventionally expressed by complex utterances than what is generally assumed in the literature on coherence relations. (shrink)

On the basis of an experimental investigation of the construals of present under past in child French, we argue that French children, just like Japanese adult speakers, but unlike French adult speakers, allow pure simultaneous construals of present under past, where the present denotes an interval that lies completely in the past, be it in relative or complement clauses. We conclude that French children have two presents: an indexical present and a zero present (just like Japanese adults, cf. Ogihara 1999, (...) 2008), suggesting that French children have both the Japanese and the French setting for the Sequence of Tense parameter since they allow simultaneous construals of both present and past under past. This multiple grammar approach to tense interpretation in child French extends to child Japanese in so far as Japanese children have been argued to allow simultaneous readings of past under past, although this reading is unavailable in the target grammar (Matsuo & Hollebrandse 1999). (shrink)

Natural languages exhibit a great variety of grammatical paradigms. For instance, in English verbs are grammatically marked for tense, whereas in the tenseless Eskimo-Aleut language Kalaallisut they are marked for illocutionary mood. Although time is a universal dimension of the human experience and speaking is part of that experience, some languages encode reference to time without any grammatical tense morphology, or reference to speech acts without any illocutionary mood morphology. Nevertheless, different grammatical systems are semantically parallel in certain (...) respects. Specifically, I propose that English tenses form a temporal centering system, which monitors and updates topic times, whereas Kalaallisut moods form a modal centering system, which monitors and updates modal discourse referents. To formalize these centering parallels I define a dynamic logic that represents not only changing information but also changing focus of attention in discourse (Update with Centering, formalizing Grosz et al 1995). Different languages can be translated into this typed logic by directly compositional universal rules of Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG) The resulting centering theory of tense and illocutionary mood draws semantic parallels across different grammatical systems. The centering generalizations span the extremes of the typological spectrum, so they are likely to be universal. In addition, the theory accounts for the translation equivalence of tense and illocutionary mood in a given utterance context. Following Stalnaker (1978) I assume that the very act of speaking up has a ‘commonplace effect’ on the context. It focuses attention on the speech act and thereby introduces default modal and temporal topics. These universal defaults complement language-specific grammars, e.g. English tenses and Kalaallisut moods. In a given utterance context the universal discourse-initial defaults plus language-specific grammatical marking may add up to the same truth conditions.. (shrink)

This volume provides a detailed account of the syntax of expressive language, that is, utterances that express, rather than describe, the emotions and attitudes of the speaker... Daniel Gutzmann demonstrates that expressivity has strong syntactic reflexes that interact with the semantic and pragmatic interpretation of these utterances, and argues that expressivity is in fact a syntactic feature on a par with other established features such as tense and gender. Evidence for this claim is drawn from three detailed case studies (...) of expressive adjectives, intensifiers, and vocatives; their puzzling properties are accounted for through a minimalist approach to syntactic features and agreement, which shows that expressivity can partake in agreement operations, trigger movement, and be selected for syntactically. The analysis not only supports the hypothesis of expressive syntax, but also highlights the hidden role that grammar may play in phenomena that are traditionally considered to be solely semantic in nature" -- Publisher. (shrink)

Normative concepts have a special taste, which many consider to be proof that they cannot be reductively analyzed into entirely nonnormative components. This paper demonstrates that at least some intuitively normative concepts can be reductively analyzed. I focus on so-called ‘hypothetical imperatives’ or ‘anankastic conditionals’, and show that the availability of normative readings of conditionals is determined by features of grammar, specifically features of tense. Properly interpreted, these grammatical features suggest that these deontic modals are analyzable in terms (...) of conditional necessity with a certain temporal structure. (shrink)

This paper discusses the distinction between the aorist and the imperfect in ancient Greek in terms of the temporality of classicism and "fame." The aorist, in focusing on its action's concrete results, can become a link between an achievement and its reception in the future: in the third grammatical person, it represents the voice of the reader who asserts the subject's accomplishment. Imperfects, by contrast, locate an event simply in the past. The article argues that Thucydides exploits to the full (...) the possibilities of this opposition and ends with a discussion of the ancient meaning of the term a-oristos, which has been lost in modern Greek grammar. (shrink)

“We have no more beginnings,” George Steiner begins in this, his most radical book to date. A far-reaching exploration of the idea of creation in Western thought, literature, religion, and history, this volume can fairly be called a magnum opus. He reflects on the different ways we have of talking about beginnings, on the “core-tiredness” that pervades our end-of-the-millennium spirit, and on the changing grammar of our discussions about the end of Western art and culture. With his well-known elegance (...) of style and intellectual range, Steiner probes deeply into the driving forces of the human spirit and our perception of Western civilization’s lengthening afternoon shadows. Roaming across topics as diverse as the Hebrew Bible, the history of science and mathematics, the ontology of Heidegger, and the poetry of Paul Celan, Steiner examines how the twentieth century has placed in doubt the rationale and credibility of a future tense—the existence of hope. Acknowledging that technology and science may have replaced art and literature as the driving forces in our culture, Steiner warns that this has not happened without a significant loss. The forces of technology and science alone fail to illuminate inevitable human questions regarding value, faith, and meaning. And yet it is difficult to believe that the story out of Genesis has ended, Steiner observes, and he concludes this masterful volume of reflections with an eloquent evocation of the endlessness of beginnings. (shrink)

Tense is the clue to the discovery of the meaning of time. Speaking hints at thinking, and language suggests a way to conceive of philosophical concepts. Here, the universality of temporality is that out of which the grammar of tense and the concept of time first come. Temporality, however, is not simply present in tense or time. On the contrary, temporality’s way of being—like being’s—is implication: tense is implied by how the verbality of verbs can (...) be spoken; time, by how temporal beings come to presence—just as being is implied in Greek, and many other languages. But then, the habits of modern Western language and philosophy must be radically reformed in order to learn how to imply again, and to think and speak about time and being as implications. (shrink)

Normative concepts have a special taste, which many consider to be proof that they cannot be reductively analyzed into entirely nonnormative components. This paper demonstrates that at least some intuitively normative concepts can be reductively analyzed. I focus on so-called ‘hypothetical imperatives’ or ‘anankastic conditionals’, and show that the availability of normative readings of conditionals is determined by features of grammar, specifically features of tense. Properly interpreted, these grammatical features suggest that these deontic modals are analyzable in terms (...) of conditional necessity with a certain temporal structure. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore the hypothesis that constructions — here understood primarily as the dependencies of Word Grammar — can undergo systematic change, sometimes partly due to the effects of the grammaticalization of a lexical item or class of lexical items. I argue that the development of will as a future tense marker in English involves the development of a new construction where two separate syntactic items are associated with a single event in the semantics. I also (...) look at the loss of the impersonal construction in English, where it has been argued that the change is driven by an increase in the schematicity of the Transitive Construction, as well as having been argued that dative experiencers have been reclassified as subjects. I observe that it has also been noted that dative experiencers could function as subjects in earlier varieties of English, and suggest that this is an example of category strengthening. (shrink)

We generalize intuitionistic tense logics to the multi-modal case by placing grammar logics on an intuitionistic footing. We provide axiomatizations for a class of base intuitionistic grammar logics as well as provide axiomatizations for extensions with combinations of seriality axioms and what we call "intuitionistic path axioms". We show that each axiomatization is sound and complete with completeness being shown via a typical canonical model construction.

We examined how language supports the expression of temporality within sentence boundaries in English, which has a rich inventory of grammatical means to express temporality. Using a computational model that mimics how humans learn from exposure we explored what the use of different tense and aspect combinations reveals about the interaction between our experience of time and the cognitive demands that talking about time puts on the language user. Our model was trained on n-grams extracted from the BNC to (...) select the TA combination that fits the context best. It revealed the existence of two different sub-systems within the set of TA combinations, a “simplex” one that is supported lexically and is easy to learn, and a “complex” one that is supported contextually and is hard to learn. The finding that some TA combinations are essentially lexical in nature necessitates a rethink of tense and aspect as grammatical categories that form the axes of the temporal system. We argue that the system of temporal reference may be more fruitfully thought of as the result of learning a system that is steeped in experience and organised along a number of functional principles. (shrink)

We provide a simple translation of the satisfiability problem for regular grammar logics with converse into GF2, which is the intersection of the guarded fragment and the 2-variable fragment of first-order logic. The translation is theoretically interesting because it translates modal logics with certain frame conditions into first-order logic, without explicitly expressing the frame conditions. It is practically relevant because it makes it possible to use a decision procedure for the guarded fragment in order to decide regular grammar (...) logics with converse. The class of regular grammar logics includes numerous logics from various application domains. A consequence of the translation is that the general satisfiability problem for every regular grammar logics with converse is in EXPTIME. This extends a previous result of the first author for grammar logics without converse. Other logics that can be translated into GF2 include nominal tense logics and intuitionistic logic. In our view, the results in this paper show that the natural first-order fragment corresponding to regular grammar logics is simply GF2 without extra machinery such as fixed-point operators. (shrink)

We provide a simple translation of the satisfiability problem for regular grammar logics with converse into GF2, which is the intersection of the guarded fragment and the 2-variable fragment of first-order logic. The translation is theoretically interesting because it translates modal logics with certain frame conditions into first-order logic, without explicitly expressing the frame conditions. It is practically relevant because it makes it possible to use a decision procedure for the guarded fragment in order to decide regular grammar (...) logics with converse. The class of regular grammar logics includes numerous logics from various application domains. A consequence of the translation is that the general satisfiability problem for every regular grammar logics with converse is in EXPTIME. This extends a previous result of the first author for grammar logics without converse. Other logics that can be translated into GF2 include nominal tense logics and intuitionistic logic. In our view, the results in this paper show that the natural first-order fragment corresponding to regular grammar logics is simply GF2 without extra machinery such as fixed-point operators. (shrink)

The idea that natural language grammar and planned action are relatedsystems has been implicit in psychological theory for more than acentury. However, formal theories in the two domains have tendedto look very different. This article argues that both faculties sharethe formal character of applicative systems based on operationscorresponding to the same two combinatory operations, namely functional composition and type-raising. Viewing them in thisway suggests simpler and more cognitively plausible accounts of bothsystems, and suggests that the language faculty evolved in (...) the speciesand develops in children by a rather direct adaptation of a moreprimitive apparatus for planning purposive action in the world bycomposing affordances of objects or tools. Theknowledge representation that underlies such planning is alsoreflected in the natural language semantics of tense, mood, andaspect, which the paper begins by arguing provides the key tounderstanding both systems. (shrink)

This paper presents an argument based on evidence from experiments featuring Antecedent-Contained Deletion sentences situated in carefully-manipulated discourse contexts, that covert movement is not grammatically constrained by tense. ACD is a form of Verb Phrase Ellipsis in which ellipsis is embedded in its antecedent. Under an account appealing to Quantifier Raising, the quantificational phrase containing the ellipsis site raises to a VP-external position, allowing the VP to become the antecedent. When ACD is embedded in a non-finite clause, such sentences (...) are ambiguous, since multiple VPs can serve as an antecedent. However, when ACD is embedded in a finite clause, the range of interpretations has been claimed to be restricted, because of an independent ‘clause-bounded’ movement constraint on Quantifier Raising. However, there are exceptions to this generalization. I present evidence from an experimental investigation of finite-clause-embedded ACD sentences, relying on Cecchetto, to demonstrate that under the right discourse conditions, the supposedly unavailable Matrix reading surfaces robustly, at a percentage that is surprising if the constraint were rooted in the grammar. I argue that these results call into question the source of this locality restriction, and propose that it has nothing to do with an arbitrary grammatical constraint on movement. (shrink)

As children gradually master grammatical rules, they often go through a period of producing form‐meaning associations that were not observed in the input. For example, 2‐ to 3‐year‐old English‐learning children use the bare form of verbs in settings that require obligatory past tense meaning while already starting to produce the grammatical –ed inflection. While many studies have focused on overgeneralization errors, fewer studies have attempted to explain the root of this earlier stage of rule acquisition. In this work, we (...) use computational modeling to replicate children's production behavior prior to the generalization of past tense production in English. We illustrate how seemingly erroneous productions emerge in a model, without being licensed in the grammar and despite the model aiming at conforming to grammatical forms. Our results show that bare form productions stem from a tension between two factors: (1) trying to produce a less frequent meaning (the past tense) and (2) being unable to restrict the production of frequent forms (the bare form) as learning progresses. Like children, our model goes through a stage of bare form production and then converges on adult‐like production of the regular past tense, showing that these different stages can be accounted for through a single learning mechanism. (shrink)

Arthur N. Prior, in the Preface of Past, Present and Future, made clear his indebtedness to “the very lively tense-logicians of California for many discussions”. Strangely,with a notable exception of Copeland, there is no extensive discussion of these scholars in the literature on the history of tense logic. In this paper, I propose to study how Nino B. Cocchiarella, as one of the Californian tense-logicians, interacted with Prior in the late 1960s. By gathering clues from their correspondence (...) available at Virtual Lab for Prior Studies, I will highlight some of the differences between their views on tense-logic, which might still have far-reaching philosophical implications. I will conclude with a sketchof how to study in what ways Prior and Cocchiarella influenced some other Californian tense-logicians. (shrink)

The topic of temporal meaning in texts has received considerable attention in recent years from scholars in linguistics, logical semantics, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence. Representing Time in Natural Language offers a systematic and detailed account of how we use temporal information contained in a text or in discourse to reason about the flow of time, inferring the order in which events happened when this is not explicitly stated. A new representational system is designed to formalize an appropriately context-dependent notion (...) of situated inference. The Dynamic Aspect Tree, representing temporal dependencies, constitutes a novel and important dynamic temporal logic, one that makes it easy to see "what follows when" from the information given in an ordinary English text. (shrink)

What is the meaning of the present and past tenses? The answer to this question depends on what objects these terms refer to. If the question is about the English tense morphemes present and past, we will get one answer; if it is about their Japanese or Russian counterparts, we will get another; and if it is about a semantic categories PRESENT and PAST attributed to the theory of Universal Grammar (UG), we will get still another. In this (...) article, I discuss the semantics (and the syntax) of (English) morphemes, but my theoretical treatment of this exploits temporal categories that I attribute to UG, expressed overtly in some languages and covertly in others. (shrink)

The subject of Time has a wide intellectual appeal across different dis ciplines. This has shown in the variety of reactions received from readers of the first edition of the present Book. Many have reacted to issues raised in its philosophical discussions, while some have even solved a number of the open technical questions raised in the logical elaboration of the latter. These results will be recorded below, at a more convenient place. In the seven years after the first publication, (...) there have been some noticeable newer developments in the logical study of Time and temporal expressions. As far as Temporal Logic proper is concerned, it seems fair to say that these amount to an increase in coverage and sophistication, rather than further break-through innovation. In fact, perhaps the most significant sources of new activity have been the applied areas of Linguistics and Computer Science (including Artificial Intelligence), where many intriguing new ideas have appeared presenting further challenges to temporal logic. Now, since this Book has a rather tight composition, it would have been difficult to interpolate this new material without endangering intelligibility. (shrink)

This book looks at the relationship between the structure of the sentence and the organization of discourse. While a sentence obeys specific grammatical rules, the coherence of a discourse is instead dependent on the relations between the sentences it contains. In this volume, leading syntacticians, semanticists, and philosophers examine the nature of these relations, where they come from, and how they apply. Chapters in Part I address points of sentence grammar in different languages, including mood and tense in (...) Spanish, definite determiners in French and Bulgarian, and the influence of aktionsart on the acquisition of tense by English, French, and Chinese children. Part II looks at modes of discourse, showing for example how discourse relations create implicatures and how Indirect Discourse differs from Free Indirect Discourse. The studies conclude that the relations between sentences that make a discourse coherent are already encoded in sentence grammar and that, once established, these relations influence the meaning of individual sentences. (shrink)

What is the meaning of language expressions and how to compute or calculate it? In this paper, we give an answer to this question by analysing the meanings of aspects and tenses in natural languages inside the formal model of an grammar of applicative, cognitive and enunciative operations , using the applicative formalism, functional types of categorial grammars and combinatory logic . In the enunciative theory and following , an utterance can be decomposed into two components: a modus and (...) a dictum . In GRACE, the modus is a complex operator applied to a proposition and is generated from more elementary operators of the categories of tense, aspect, and modality. The dictum is a proposition generated by a predicative relation. In this way, we can attribute a semantic meaning to different grammatical aspecto-temporal operators. The applicative expressions of CL can be easily translated into a functional programming language such as HASKELL or CAML. (shrink)

Logic and linguistics have engaged in a many-faceted dialogue since the very beginnings of both disciplines in Antiquity. While participants may have had diverse views over the ages, arguably, the dialogue has always revolved around the relationship between human thought and natural language. While there are those who see these two domains as one and the same, or as a case of one-directional influence , we beg to differ. To us, the long historical tradition of authors such as Arnauld, Boole, (...) Turing, or Jespersen demonstrates the much richer perspectives on language and reasoning that are needed, including connections with intelligence and computability.Another major historical theme in the above dialogue are similarities or convergences between natural and artificial languages. It is clear that natural languages are not only semantically broader, but also much closer to human communication than artificial languages, and so linguistic grammars have long dealt with a larger set of problems than logical formalism. This specal issue of JoLLI consists six selected papers presented in the "Logic and Linguisics" Workshop in UNI-LOG 2013 in Rio de Janeiro, plus two papers by invited authors: Johan van Benthem, and Marcus Kracht and Uno Klein. It contains a number of samples of what is intriguing and promising work at the interfaces of logic and language. (shrink)

The essays in this collection are the outgrowth of a workshop, held in June 1976, on formal approaches to the semantics and pragmatics of natural languages. They document in an astoundingly uniform way the develop ments in the formal analysis of natural languages since the late sixties. The avowed aim of the' workshop was in fact to assess the progress made in the application of formal methods to semantics, to confront different approaches to essentially the same problems on the one (...) hand, and, on the other, to show the way in relating semantic and pragmatic explanations of linguistic phenomena. Several of these papers can in fact be regarded as attempts to close the 'semiotic circle' by bringing together the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic properties of certain constructions in an explanatory framework thereby making it more than obvious that these three components of an integrated linguistic theory cannot be as neatly separated as one would have liked to believe. In other words, not only can we not elaborate a syntactic description of (a fragment of) a language and then proceed to the semantics (as Montague pointed out already forcefully in 1968), we cannot hope to achieve an adequate integrated syntax and semantics without paying heed to the pragmatic aspects of the constructions involved. The behavior of polarity items, 'quantifiers' like any, conditionals or even logical particles like and and or in non-indicative sentences is clear-cut evidence for the need to let each component of the grammar inform the other. (shrink)

Adverbial modification is probably one of the least understood areas of linguistics. The essays in this volume all address the problem of how to give an analysis of adverbial modifiers within truth-conditional semantics. Chapters I-VI provide analyses of particular modifiers within a possible worlds framework, and were written between 1974 and 1981. Original publication details of these chapters may be found on p. vi. Of these, all but Chapter I make essential use of the idea that the time reference involved (...) in tensed sentences should be a time interval rather than a single instant. The final chapter (Chapter VII) was written especially for this volume and investigates the question of how the 'situation semantics' recently devised by Jon Barwise and John Perry, as a rival to possible-worlds semantics, might deal with adverbs. In addition I have included an appendix to Chapter III and an introduction which links all the chapters together. (shrink)

The contributions in this grammar-theoretical volume examine current developmental trends in German under the aspect of changing coding techniques. These tendencies include morpho-syntactical changes in the realization of aspect, tense and mode as well as tendencies to omit the article and the processes resulting from this and also purely syntactic changes like the distance position of pronominal adverbs.

The idea that an adequate semantics of ordinary language calls for some theory of events has sparked considerable debate among linguists and philosophers. On the one hand, so many linguistic phenomena appear to be explained if (and, according to some authors, only if) we make room for logical forms in which reference to or quantification over events is explicitly featured. Examples include nominalization, adverbial modification, tense and aspect, plurals, and singular causal statements. On the other hand, a number of (...) deep philosophical questions arise as soon as we take events into consideration. Are events entities of a kind? What are their identity and individuation criteria? How does semantic theorizing depend on such metaphysical issues? The aim of this book is to address such issues in some depth, with emphasis precisely on the interplay between linguistic applications and philosophical implications. Contributors: N. Asher, P. M. Bertinetto, J. Brandl, D. Delfitto, R. Eckardt, J. Higginbotham, A. Lenci, T. Parsons, A. ter Meulen, H. Verkuyl. A comprehensive introductory essay (pp. 3-47) is included. (shrink)

Possession and transitivity -- The indirect object, its status and place -- Categories and arguments -- The active-passive configuration -- Verbal affixation -- Why Kaatje was not heard sing a song (with Hans Bennis) -- T-chains and auxiliaries (with Jacqueline Guéron) -- Clitics in romance and the study of head-movement -- ECP, tense and islands -- Bracketing paradoxes do not exist (with Harry van der Hulst and Frans van der Putten) -- The nominal infinitive (with Pim Wehrmann) -- Parallels (...) between nominal and verbal projections -- Complex verbs (with Monic Lansu and Marion Westerduin) -- Small clauses everywhere. (shrink)

The aim of this study is to determine to what extent the tense markers of tense logic represent what is represented by the tense forms of natural language. To achieve this, it will be necessary to report the findings of linguistics on what the tense forms of natural languages do represent. The justification for this study lies in a fundamental difference between natural and logical languages. Where natural languages develop to meet the needs of their speakers, (...) logical language is used for testing the validity of argument of a certain kind. Tense logic has been used to examine philosophical issues, and in linguistics to examine how tenses describe many different possible structures of time. (shrink)

In the 1960’s, both Montague (e.g. 1970, 222) and Grice (1975, 24) famously declared that natural languages were not so different from the formal languages of logic as people had thought. Montague sought to comprehend the grammars of both within a single theory, and Grice sought to explain away apparent divergences as due to the fact that the former, but not the latter, were used for conversation. But, if we confine our concept of logic to first order predicate logic (or (...) FOPL) with identity (that is, omitting everything which is not required for the pursuit of mathematical truth), then there are of course many other aspects, in addition to its use in conversation, which distinguish natural language from logic. Conventional implicature, information structure (including presupposition), tense and time reference, and the expression of causation and inference are several of these, which combine as well with syntactic complexities which are unnecessary in first order predicate logic. In this paper I will argue that such distinguishing aspects should be more fully exploited to explain the differences between the material conditional of logic and the indicative conditional of one natural language (English). (shrink)

Michel Paladian. Function of characterization in present tense. This article is devoted to a field in cognitive and semantic analysis where stylistics and grammar meet: it concerns the function of characterisation in the Present tense. In general, linguistic works, which are devoted to the Present tense, take into account only the time and the aspect. However, from a point of cognitive view, the values of the Present are not limited to the Verb; they also relate to (...) the values of the Adjective. We must thus take into consideration not only the Time conceptualisation (time features), but also the Space conceptualisation (space features). We know, since Davidson, how the event, which the Verb represents, can be broken up into phases; it is to the one of these phases that the function of actualisation is attached. Actualisation is parallel to the function of characterisation specific to the Adjective. As such this phase seizes, retains and assimilates entities and processes of the world in their instantaneous appearance. This cognitive operation can also be analyzed on another level: on the level of visual work. (shrink)

We develop a semiotic scheme of time, in which time precipitates from the repeated succession of punctuating the progressive tense by the perfect tense. The underlying principle is communication among local participants. Time can thus be seen as a meaning-making, semiotic system in which different time codes are delineated, each having its own grammar and timekeeping. The four time codes discussed are the following: the subjective time having tense, the objective time without tense, the static (...) time without timekeeping, and the inter-subjective time of the E-series. Living organisms adopt a time code called the E-series, which emerges through the local synchronization among organisms or parts of organisms. The inter-subjective time is a new theoretical dimension resulting from the time-aligning activities of interacting agents. Such synchronization in natural settings consists of incessant mutual corrections and adjustments to one’s own punctuation, which is then constantly updated. Unlike the third-person observer keeping the objective time while sitting outside a clock, the second-person negotiators participate in forming the E-series time by punctuating and updating the interface through which different tenses meet at the moment of “now.” Although physics allows physicists to be the only interpreters, the semiotic perspective upends the physical perspective by letting local participants be involved in the interpretation of their mutual negotiations to precipitate that which is called time. (shrink)

The only obligatory temporal expression in English is tense, yet Hans Reichenbach (1947) has argued convincingly that the simplest sentence is understood in terms of three temporal notions. Additional possibilities for a simple sentence are limited: English sentences have one time adverbial each. It is not immediately clear how to resolve these matters, that is, how (if at all) Reichenbach's account can be reconciled with the facts of English. This paper attempts to show that they can be reconciled, and (...) presents an analysis of temporal specification that is based directly on Reichenbach's account.Part I is devoted to a study of the way the three times—speech time, reference time, event time—are realized and interpreted. The relevant syntactic structures and their interaction and interpretation are examined in detail. Part II discusses how a grammar should deal with time specification, and proposes a set of interpretive rules. The study offers an analysis of simple sentences, sentences with complements, and habitual sentences. It is shown that tense and adverbials function differently, depending on the structure in which they appear. The temporal system is relational: the orientation and values of temporal expressions are not fixed, but their relational values are consistent. This consistency allows the statement of principles of interpretation. (shrink)

The basic ideas of game-theoretical semantics are implicit in logicians' and mathematicians' folklore but used only sporadically (e.g., game quantifiers, back-and-forth methods, partly ordered quantifiers). the general suggestions of this approach for natural languages are emphasized: the univocity of "is," the failure of compositionality, a reconstruction of aristotelian categories, limitations of generative grammars, unity of sentence and discourse semantics, a new treatment of tenses and other temporal notions, etc.

Arguably the biggest challenge in analyzing English tense is to account for the double access interpretation, which arises when a present tensed verb is embedded under a past attitude—e.g., "John said that Mary is pregnant". Present-under-past does not always result in a felicitous utterance, however—cf. "John believed that Mary is pregnant". While such oddity has been noted, the contrast has never been explained. In fact, English grammars and manuals generally prohibit present-under-past. Work on double access, on the other hand, (...) has either disregarded the oddity (e.g., Abusch 1997: 39) or treated it as a reflex of a particular dialect (e.g., Kratzer 1998: 14). The goal of the paper is to argue—based on a corpus study—that a present-under-past sentence is grammatical, but modulated by two, interacting pragmatic phenomena: cessation and parentheticality. (shrink)

Resumen: En lo que sigue ofrezco una exploración de dos “conceptos tensos”: “pueblo” y “populismo”. En la primera sección abordaré la noción de “pueblo” a través de lo que se podría considerar su gramática populista. Luego desarrollaré algunas reflexiones sobre la división de campo que el populismo instala con su apelación al “pueblo” o a cualquiera de las otras nociones que tengan una función similar en su retórica. Analizaré, pues, la cuestión del antagonismo, la partición del espacio social y del (...) espacio del poder entre “ellos” y “nosotros”. Por último, plantearé la cuestión de la democracia como aquello que, en última instancia, está en juego en el desafío ambiguo del populismo.: In what follows I offer an exploration of two “tense concepts”: “people” and “populism”. In the first part I address the notion of “people” through what might be considered its populist grammar. Then I develop some reflec-tions on the field division that populism introduces with its appeal to the “people” or any of the other notions that have a similar function in their rhetoric. I will therefore analyze the antagonism, the partitioning of social space and the space of power between a “them” and an “us”. Finally, I raise the question of democracy as what is ultimately at stake in the ambiguous challenge of populism. (shrink)

In recent years, the category of evidentiality has also come into use for the description of Romance languages and of German. This has been contingent on a change in its interpretation from a typological category to a semantic-pragmatic category, which allows an application to languages lacking specialised morphemes for the expression of evidentiality. We consider evidentiality to be a structural dimension of grammar, the values of which are expressed by types of constructions that code the source of information which (...) a speaker imparts. If we look at the situation in Romance languages and in German, drawing a boundary between epistemic modality and evidentiality presents problems that are difficult to solve. Adding markers of the source of the speaker’s knowledge often limits the degree of responsibility of the speaker for the content of the utterance. Evidential adverbs are a frequently used means of marking the source of the speaker’s knowledge. The evidential meaning is generalised to marking any source of knowledge, what can be regarded as a result of a process of pragmaticalisation. The use of certain means which also carry out evidential markings can even contribute to the blurring of the different kinds of evidentiality. German also has modal verbs which in conjunction with the perfect tense of the verb have a predominantly evidential use. But even here the evidential marking is not without influence on the modality of the utterance. The Romance languages, however, do not have such specialised verbs for expressing evidentiality in certain contexts. To do this, they mark evidentiality – often context bound – by verb forms such as the conditional and the imperfect tense. This article shall contrast the different architectures used in expressing evidentiality in German and in the Romance languages. (shrink)

The iltifāt (reference switching) is one of the arts of high literary value, widely practiced in the Qurʾān. This art takes place in the form of switching to another person, verb mode, number, preposition or sentence type contrary to the necessity of the situation, while continuing the word as a certain person, verb mode, number, preposition or sentence type. The art of iltifāt adds certain meanings to words such as certainty, continuity and movement. It keeps the curiosity, desire, excitement and (...) shiver alive. Similar to those who read the Qurʾān, those who read the translation of the Qurʾān are expected to be able to notice these meanings as much as possible and feel the literary pleasure of this art. There are important structural differences between Arabic and Turkish. In addition, the text that needs to be translated into Turkish is Holy Qurʾān, which has a divine infinite dimension, and it is a limited human mind attempts to translate it. This situation requires an advanced level of caution and diligence in transferring the art of iltifāt to the translations of Qurʾān. The issue of the art of iltifāt and the transfer of this art to the translations of the Qurʾān has also been studied in scientific research in different world languages such as Arabic, English and Indonesian. As far as we can determine, the only study in Turkish that examines the reflection of the iltifāt in the Qurʾān is the article titled "The Translation Problem of the Art of iltifāt in the Translation of the Qurʾān" by Haşim Özdaş. In the mentioned article, five different Qurʾān translations of eight verses from different types of the art of iltifāt were examined. It has been claimed that there is no art of iltifāt in Turkish language and literature, and that the translation of the art of iltifāt in the verses into Turkish is an obstacle to understanding the verses and leads to a wrong or incomplete understanding. As a solution, while the verses are being given and translated, it is suggested that the art of iltifāt in the verses be ignored. In this research article, the cases of the translations of the Qurʾān reflecting the art of iltifāt, as an example of iltifāt between māzī (past tense) and muzāriʻ (present tense) verbs modes in the verses are discussed. In addition, it discusses the opinions that say there is no art of iltifāt in the Turkish language, that the exact transfer of the art of iltifāt found in the Qurʾān to the translations of the Qurʾān causes wrong or incomplete understanding, therefore, the art of iltifāt should be ignored when the verses are being translated. As a result, the present study argues that the art of iltifāt is also a subject of Turkish rhetoric, which should be reflected in the translations of the Qurʾān as much as possible, and the transfer of the art of iltifāt in the translations of the Qurʾān does not constitute an obstacle to understanding the verses, on the contrary, the reference to this art in the verses will contribute to the realization of the divine purpose and wisdom. The data sources of the research were created from 6 verses and their 22 different translations, using various sampling methods. The data collected from these were analysed using the comparative text analysis method on the basis of the inductive approach. Qualitative data was converted into quantitative data, processed in the SPSS application, and the findings were presented as numerical figures in tables. At the end of the research, it was determined that iltifāt between māzī and muzāriʻ verbs modes studied in the science of rhetoric was also a subject of grammar as the phenomenon of time shifts in verbs. It was seen that the art of iltifāt was applied in an average of 800 places in the Qurʾān, and the iltifāt between māzī and muzāriʻ verbs modes accounted for 6.9% (55 pieces) of this amount. Most of these fifty-five iltifāts were iltifāt from the māzī verb mode to the muzāriʻ verb mode (63.6%), while the amount of iltifāt the muzāriʻ verb mode to the māzī verb mode was less (36.4%). In the analysed translations of the Qurʾān, it was determined that the iltifāt between māzī and muzāriʻ verbs modes was not reflected at a rate of 90.9%, and the art of iltifāt was completely abandoned in 14 of the 22 translations. It was concluded that the reason why the art of iltifāt in the verses was not reflected in the translations of the Qurʾān was the belief that this art was not found in Turkish and that the transfer of this art leads to wrong and incomplete understanding. In the research, it was proposed to increase the number of scientific studies in which various translation strategies and techniques were tested in the transfer of the art of iltifāt in the verses in the translations of the Qurʾān. In this respect, this research article is expected to pave the way for more research on the issue of transferring the arts used in the Qurʾān and to be useful for future translations of the Qurʾān. (shrink)

In this paper I will discuss a rather recondite phenomenon in the area of sequence of tense (SOT), exhibited by sentences like (1): (1) John said that Mary is pregnant. According to traditional grammar, this is a sentence where sequence of tense has failed to apply (i.e., concord has been broken): standard sequence of tense rules would dictate use of a past tense when embedding an event contemporaneous to the embedding verb under a past (...) class='Hi'>tense verb, giving the sentence John said that Mary was pregnant. For some verbs breaking concord is impossible (*Mary said that John builds a house) or can only have a present-as-future interpretation (John said that the last spaceship to Mars leaves tomorrow), but with stative verbs, as En¸c (1987) and others have observed, this failure of sequence of tense to apply is associated with a rather special meaning, which we will try to elucidate below. For the moment, let us merely observe that the use of present tense seems to cause such sentences to end up saying something about a larger interval including both the time of utterance and the time of the event described in the main clause. For this reason En¸c calls them “double access sentences”, but that seems a rather dubious name as the interpretation seems to rely on evaluation at a large interval, not just at two points. (shrink)

This set brings together the most important contributions to semantic theory ranging from Gottlob Frege's 1892 essay "On Sense and Reference" to recent cutting-edge scholarship from leading journals in the field. The collection is structured around three major themes: * Fundamental notions, the relations between semantics and grammar and the relations between meaning and cognition * The semantics of basic grammatical constructions and structures, such as the semantics of determiners, nouns, adjectives and related topics including quantifier scope and the (...) definiteness/indefiniteness distinction. * Topics related to sentential and discourse semantics: events and thematic roles, tense, aspect and modality, negation, ellipsis, questions, pronouns and the semantics/pragmatics interface. (shrink)

The progressive in English appears to be inherently modal, due to what Dowty (Word meaning and Montague grammar: The semantics of verbs and times in generative semantics and in Montague’s PTQ, 1979) terms the imperfective paradox. In truth-conditional accounts, the literal truth of a clause with the modal progressive hinges on the possibility of the described outcome. The clause’s truth under such accounts has also been tacitly assumed to describe its felicitous use. Two challenges for this strategy are discussed. (...) First, a progressive clause exhibiting the imperfective paradox can occur felicitously even when the described outcome is not possible. Second, a progressive clause exhibiting the paradox can occur felicitously with an accompanying unless-clause, yet the analysis of unless-clauses directly contradicts the modal analysis of the truth-conditional behavior of the progressive clause in such cases. If the analysis of unless is not flawed, then the modal progressive will require reanalysis. (shrink)