Judith Tonhauser – April 2, 2010
Mar 27th, 2010 by
We are pleased to welcome Judith Tonhauser from The Ohio State University as our first presenter of Spring quarter. Please join us for her talk on Friday April 2 in the Landahl Center at 11am.
“Temporal anaphora of noun phrases”
In this talk, I argue that temporal anaphora are central to the temporal interpretation of noun phrases; in particular, that the noun phrase time, the time at which a noun phrase is temporally interpreted, is a temporal anaphor. The proposal improves on Enc’s (1981, 1986) finding that the temporal interpretation of noun phrases depends on the discourse context by specifying constraints on the resolution of the noun phrase time that predict which noun phrases are interpreted at a time distinct from the reference time. It preserves the key insight of Musan’s work (1995/1997, 1996, 1999) that pragmatic constraints on noun phrase interpretation affect their temporal interpretation, while avoiding empirical and theoretical problems of Musan’s account, pointed out in part in Tonhauser (2002, 2006) and Keshet (2008), as well as related problems of Kusumoto (1999, 2005). Predictions for the cross-linguistic temporal semantics of noun phrases are derived from a comparison between the temporal interpretation of noun phrases and verbal expressions.
References:
Enc, Murvet. 1981. Tense without Scope. An Analysis of Nouns of Indexicals. Ph.D. Thesis, Univesity of Wisconsin, Madison.
Enc, Murvet. 1986. Towards a referential analysis of temporal expressions. Linguistics and Philosophy, 9:405–426.
Keshet, Ezra. 2008. Good Intensions: Paving Two Roads to a Theory of the De re/De dicto Distinction. Ph.D. thesis, MIT.
Kusumoto, Kiyomi. 1999. Tense in Embedded Contexts. Ph.D. thesis, University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
Kusumoto, K. (2005). On the quantification over times in natural language. Natural Language Semantics, 13: 317-357.
Musan, Renate. 1995. On the Temporal Interpretation of Noun Phrases. Ph.D. Thesis, MIT.
Musan, Renate. 1996. There-constructions revisited. In T. Galloway and J. Spence, eds., Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) VI, pages 167–184. Ithaca, NY: CLC Publications.
Musan, Renate. 1997. On the Temporal Interpretation of Noun Phrases. New York: Garland. Publication of 1995 MIT Ph.D. thesis.
Musan, Renate. 1999. Temporal interpretation and information-status of noun phrases. Linguistics and Philosophy 22: 621-661.
Tonhauser, Judith. 2002. A dynamic semantic account of the temporal interpretation of noun phrases. In B. Jackson, ed., Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) XII, pages 286–305. Ithaca, NY: CLC Publications.
Tonhauser, Judith. 2006. The Temporal Semantics of Noun Phrases: Evidence from Guaraní. Ph.D. thesis, Stanford University.