Subclasses of Temporal and Spatial Phrases in Portuguese – Location <i>vs.</i> Mere Reference

Abstract

This paper deals with the diversity of temporal and spatial phrases -mainly those headed by prepositions or preposition-like connectives -that convey locating information or involve mere temporal/spatial reference. It shows that the different subclasses are quite heterogeneous in Portuguese, and exhibit interesting, syntactically complex, patterns. A certain degree of instability in their use, likely indicative of linguistic change (mainly in Standard European Portuguese), is illustrated through the use of corpora examples. English data is often used for comparison. The formal framework underlying the linguistic analyses is Discourse Representation Theory (cf. Kamp & Reyle 1993).Keywords: temporal/spatial adjuncts; temporal/spatial location; temporal/spatial reference; linguistic anomaly; linguistic change; categorisation Categorial diversity of temporal/spatial phrases, expressing location and mere referencePrevious work on Portuguese temporal phrases (e.g. Móia 2000Móia , 2001 has emphasized the issue of categorial diversity within this class, claiming that -when temporal location and temporal reference are consideredtwo major distinct, though interrelated, subclasses need be distinguished: (i) temporal locating adjuncts, which are used to associate eventualities with time intervals, asserting when things happened; (ii) timedenoting expressions, which are used simply to identify, or denote, time intervals. The former class is prototypically exemplified by prepositional phrases headed by em ('in'), as in (1); the second, by nominal phrases as o século XX ('the 20th century'), as in (2)

Relativized temporal phrases: Language variation and change in contemporary Portuguese

“…Kamp & Reyle, 1993), the information at stake is that the location interval t of the whole sentence (describing an eventuality ev) coincides with the interval t′ associated with the complement of the preposition (i.e., the relative pronoun, in this case), and the location mode is either inclusion (DRS-condition: [ev ⊆ t]), for telic eventualities, or mere overlapping (DRScondition: [ev o t]), for atelic ones. This is well known for non-relativized temporal adjuncts (cf., e.g., Móia, 2000, 2016, and is clearly the case for relativized ones too.…”