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Discourse transparency and the meaning of temporal locating adverbs

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Abstract

This paper proposes that a core semantic property of temporal locating adverbs is the ability (or the lack thereof) to introduce a new time discourse referent. The core data comes from that same day in narrative discourse. I argue that unlike other previously studied temporal locating adverbs—which introduce a new time discourse referent and relate it to the speech time or a salient time introduced into the discourse context—that same day is ‘twice anaphoric’, i.e. it retrieves two salient times from the input context without introducing one of its own. Moreover, I argue that the adverb currently is like that same day in not introducing a new time discourse referent. Unlike that same day, however, currently has both a deictic and an anaphoric usage analogous to on Sunday. The analysis that I propose is implemented within Compositional Discourse Representation Theory. It illustrates how adverbial meaning can be integrated within a more general theory of temporal interpretation.

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Acknowledgments

Thanks to Alice ter Meulen, Barbara H. Partee, Guillaume Thomas, and Roger Schwarzschild for providing comments on previous versions of this paper. Thanks to Katja Jasinskaja, Rajesh Bhatt, and Sam Cumming for fruitful discussions that led to many substantial improvements. Thanks to Hans Kamp, Reinhard Muskens, and Yael Sharvit for inviting me to present the material found here in their research groups and seminars. Thanks to Hana Filip for co-teaching two seminars with me at Heinrich Heine University and a class at ESSLLI 2013. These experiences sharpened my ideas about temporal adverbs and about temporality more generally. Thanks to the participants at the following venues, where work related to this paper was presented: SALT 21 at Rutgers University, the University of Delaware, the University of Pennsylvania, Concordia University, Syracuse University, and Haverford College. Last but certainly not least, thanks to Angelika Kratzer, Irene Heim, Christine Bartels, and the anonymous reviewers for NALS, who provided extremely insightful feedback. The usual disclaimers apply.

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  1. Department of Linguistics, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, Universitätsstr. 1, 40225, Düsseldorf, Germany

    Daniel Altshuler

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Altshuler, D. Discourse transparency and the meaning of temporal locating adverbs. Nat Lang Semantics 22, 55–88 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11050-013-9100-2

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