Date:
Friday, April 27, 2012 - 2:30pm - 4:00pm
Location:
Memorial 037
Title: Adverbial transparency and the meaning of 'that same day'
Abstract:
In this talk I propose that a core property of adverbial meaning is the ability (or the lack thereof) of an adverbial 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 adverbials—which introduce a new time discourse referent and relate it to the speech time or a previously mentioned time—that same day retrieves two salient times from the input context, i.e. it is ‘twice-anaphoric’, without introducing one of its own. 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.
