This book is a major attempt to reconcile the empirical basis of linguistic science with the a priori nature of philosophical reasoning. Its purpose is to show how the methods and findings of linguistic science, especially of transformational grammar, can be used to cast light upon central problems of analytic philosophy. After dealing with recent objections to the use of linguistic techniques in philosophy, the author shows, with great force and clarity, how these techniques can be applied to such problems (...) as the analysis of singular terms, the concepts of fact, event, and causality, and the meaning of the word "good.". (shrink)

This paper proposes a new look at the so-called ‘present-perfect puzzle’. I suggest that it is in fact part of a bigger problem, which also involves simple past tenses. I argue that present perfects compete with simple past tenses, and that the distribution of these tenses shows signs of the impact of this competition. The outcome of the competition is argued to be heavily dependent on which of the two tense-forms is the default. A pragmatic theory is proposed which accounts (...) for the reduced distribution of the present perfect in languages like English and (American) Spanish, and the reduced distribution of the simple past tense in languages like French and German. (shrink)

The English perfect involves two fundamental components of meaning: a truth-conditional one involving temporal notions and a current relevance presupposition best expressed in terms drawn from the analysis of modality. The proposal made here draws much for the Extended Now theory (McCoard 1978 and others), but improves on it by showing that many aspects of the perfect's meaning may be factored out into independent semantic or pragmatic principles.

Preface This book is about semantics and logic. More specifically, it is about the semantics and logic of natural language; and, even more specifically than ...

relations between events both require a more complex structure on the domain underlying the meaning representations than is commonly assumed. This paper proposes an ontology based on such notions as causation and consequence, rather than on purely temporal primitives. A central notion in the ontology..

Ich verteidige in diesem Aufsatz die These, daß die Kernbedeutung des deutschen Perfekts ein Extended Now im Sinne von McCoard (1978) ist. Es handelt sich dabei um ein Intervall, das die Referenzzeit r als rechte Grenze hat und in eine kontextuell oder lexikalisch begrenzte Vergangenheit reicht. r selbst gehört mit zum Intervall. Ich nenne dieses Intervall XNP(r). Für das Futur ist ein analoges Intervall anzunehmen, welches die Referenzzeit als linke Grenze hat, in die Zukunft reicht und das XNF(r) genannt wird. (...) Auch hier gehört r mit zum Intervall. (shrink)

In English, the present perfect, unlike future, past, and non-finite perfects, cannot be modified by so-called ‘positional’ adverbials (Comrie 1976, McCoard 1978, a.o.). This phenomenon is known as the present perfect puzzle (Klein 1992).

In English, [1e] occurs only in have got, but it is included here because of its importance in other languages. In Vedic Sanskrit and ancient Greek, for example, the perfect of many achievement predicates can be used to denote the result state. A good semantics of the perfect should therefore have something to say about it.