Abstract
The compositional analysis of sentences like “Tony has been happy since he’s been taking Prozac” becomes feasible through a combination of a maximal informativeness semantics for definite descriptions and an elided second “since” inside the “since”-clause.
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- 1.
Some more archaeology reveals that Sabine’s work on temporal existentials existed well before 1999, as it is mentioned in von Fintel (1999). The current work was first presented under the title “Simultaneous readings” at Sinn und Bedeutung in Osnabrück in 2001 and at a 2003 colloquium at Rutgers, where feedback was given by Roger.
- 2.
In our formal implementation, we associate the Perfect with an existential quantifier introducing the PTS. One could set up an alternative, “referential” theory, but we won’t explore this here. We do not believe that this affects our puzzle.
- 3.
As IAI state, their analysis is in the spirit of the “extended now” theory of McCoard (1978).
- 4.
We leave implicit the condition that \(t',t'',t'''\) have to be distinct.
- 5.
We note that this somewhat impressionistic way of stating the truth-conditions is only directly appropriate for predicates with the subinterval property. Later on, we will give a more precise analysis, which, in fact, will not have a universal quantifier but state an inclusion relation of the PTS within the interval at which the lower predicate holds. Cf. example (41) and our analysis in (42b).
- 6.
Our formal definitions in (36) and (37b) will reflect this.
- 7.
The reader should remember that the terms “Perfect” and “Perfective”, though they sound alike in English, refer to two very different things.
- 8.
There are, of course, alternative views, which we will not discuss in this paper. We do not think that they would help with our puzzle. But for the curious, see Chapter 6 of Altshuler (2016).
- 9.
We follow Kratzer (1998) and others in using the non-proper sub/superset relations to implement the Kleinian aspect meanings. The anonymous reviewer points out that this predicts that one and the same sentence can be used both in the perfective and in the imperfective if the TT and the ST happen to coincide. We have nothing to say about this here, but see Footnote 15.
- 10.
Even though there is some confusion, there is also a convention about when to use the term “Imperfective” and when the term “Progressive”. The latter is used when the morpheme describes events in progress and has the semantics in (23b) or (24b). The term “Imperfective” is used when the morpheme in question appears in sentences describing events in progress as well as in generic and habitual sentences. (The question of why it should be so often one and the same morpheme which expresses events in progress and habitual/generic statements has received a fair amount of attention.) So strictly speaking, the semantics we gave in (23b)/(24b) would justify us using the term “Progressive” and not the term “Imperfective”. In fact, this can be seen in the Perfect of the habitual/generic uses of the English simple Past (which in episodic sentences is interpreted as perfective): I have worked at MIT since 1997. However, we will keep using the term “Imperfective” because the Perfect of the habitual/generic use of the imperfective also yields the U-Perfect, a crucial component of what this paper is about. So the gap in our exposition will be not the wrong use of a term, but the fact that we do not give a semantics for genericity/habituality and show that the Perfect of that imperfective category also yields the U-Perfect.
- 11.
The Perfect of the Imperfective can also yield an E-Perfect, as in Comrie’s Have you ever been watching television when the tube exploded? (Comrie 1976: 62). But such sentences are not encountered frequently, possibly because in addition to meeting the requirements of the Perfect, the use of the progressive needs to be justified by an anchoring adverbial. This in turn means that there should be an additional operator, of the Perfective type, to get all the right relationships in place. Possibly this is what makes this type of sentence rare, also in corpora.
- 12.
A reviewer points out that with activities like read books, the subinterval property needs to be understood in a way that allows for temporal gaps, such as bathroom breaks. See Landman (2012) for discussion.
- 13.
Modulo Footnote 11.
- 14.
Note that the definitions in (36) and (37b) make it possible to talk about a large interval like 1990 to characterize the left boundary of a PTS: what that means is that the start of the PTS is somewhere in 1990. So, the LB relation between intervals in (37b) says that one interval contains the start of another. We thank a reviewer for suggesting an improvement in the way we defined RB and LB.
- 15.
As it stands, our meaning does not exclude that the visit is ongoing at the utterance time. In fact, though, it seems one would have to say Tony has been visiting Cape Cod (ever) since 1990 or even Tony has been on a visit to Cape Cod since 1990. If we wanted to exclude such a reading for (38), we could explore making Prf introduce a proper subinterval of the previous evaluation time.
- 16.
We are ignoring here the causal uses of since.
- 17.
For indefinite arguments of since, see Iatridou (2014): fn. 17.
- 18.
A function taking an event to its run time or temporal trace was introduced and employed by Krifka (1989). Of course, one could also say that since is slightly ambiguous. One homonym would be the one we defined and the other would take an event as its argument and return the same result as its relative would have if it had been applied to the time interval the event occupies. Take your pick.
- 19.
Actually, Iatridou (2014) talks about definite event descriptions, not just definite time intervals, but this distinction is not relevant for us here.
- 20.
Iatridou (2014) shows that the effect of the empty PTS is derived only when the LB is a single event. When the definite description refers to the only salient event (as definite descriptions are expected to be able to refer to salient individuals, in the presence of non-salient ones), then the effect of the empty PTS is correctly predicted to not necessarily come about.
- 21.
Though recall that we saw in the context of (16)/(18) that it is not impossible that the eventuality started before the PTS:
- 22.
The reader may wonder why (i) is better than (76). We will provide an answer to this once we have laid out our proposal.
(i) Tony has been happy since he was in the hospital.
- 23.
This is the “LF-fill in” version of ellipsis, which is the way Larson has it; the “PF-deletion” will yield the same results.
- 24.
Of course, while they are true, actually asserting them would bring with it implicatures that would be extremely misleading. Appealing to implicatures will not, however, alleviate the semantic problem for the analysis of definites.
- 25.
We can now also return to the question raised in Footnote 23, namely, the contrast in (i–ii). In the main text in Sect. 4.1, we explained why (i)(=76) is out. In this footnote, we explain the status of (ii).
In our analysis, (ii) claims that Tony has been happy since the most informative interval t such that there is a time \(t'\) before now such that there is a time \(t''\) that includes \(t'\) and that is a time at which Tony is in the hospital and that is = t.
What if he’s not anymore in the hospital? Then, the most informative interval will be the entire time interval at which he was in the hospital. That is OK.
What if he’s still in the hospital? Then, the most informative interval will be the entire time interval at which he is in the hospital from its start and until now. Then, the sentence will have a meaning that is as trivial as (i).
We don’t hear this meaning; instead, we hear that Tony’s hospital stay was in the past. It seems that the fact that there would be a trivial reading if he were still in the hospital serves to help the hearer to exclude that possibility.
- 26.
This sentence should be read in the temporal sense and not the adversial sense, which does not even require a Perfect:
(i) Oh yeah? Since when are you an expert on butterflies?
- 27.
We have already seen that stranding of since is not possible. In fact, we used this to explain the obligatoriness of ACD à la (Larson 1987) in the case of the missing since.
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. MS: MIT.Acknowledgements
For helpful comments on this paper, we thank Daniel Altshuler and an anonymous reviewer.
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von Fintel, K., Iatridou, S. (2019). Since
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In: Altshuler, D., Rett, J. (eds) The Semantics of Plurals, Focus, Degrees, and Times. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04438-1_15
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