Sabine Gründer: Eine dynamische Semantik für temporale Adverbiale

The paper offers a new type of approach to the semantic phenomenon of adverbial aspect shift. It accounts for standard data that resisted a full theoretical explanation so far and deals with some challenging new data, moreover. The theory combines concepts from the fields of theoretical computer science (regular languages), artificial intelligence (hierarchical abstraction), philosophical logic (supervaluations), and theoretical linguistics (syntactic phases; aspectual viewpoint).

According to the proposal, temporal prepositions are dynamic presuppositions that can aspectually underspecify a situational concept. The simple algorithm underlying it derives the correct set of possible interpretations on the basis of lexical semantic input only, and, furthermore, may claim cognitive plausibility. The frramework used is Finite-State Temporal Semantics by T. Fernando.

The proposal gets supplemented by an idea for formally deriving left/right contrasts in the interpretation of temporal adverbial modifiers. According to the proposal made, the semantic status of the adverbial is not fully determined by syntactic structure but by information structure. The new concept of 'semantic phases' may open up a new general way of discussing adverbial interpretation at the interface between semantic, syntax and pragmatic.

The syntactic part of the propoasal treats English left- and right peripheral adverbials as Orphans. The implementation uses an adapted version of Dynamic Syntax by Kempson et.al. Prosodic features, reflecting the contextual status of the modifiers, serve to effectively fix its position in logical structure.

The general solution that appears behind the different problems here is the idea of granularity or underspecification. That means, the various puzzling effects in connection with the interpretation of temporal adverbials reflect systematic mechanisms of taking in or leaving out conceptual details for the sake of efficiency.