Tense and Temporal Adverbs

Abstract

The goal of this chapter is to explore the meaning of now . The upshot of this exploration is a glimpse of how the meanings of tense and temporal adverbs interact. The chapter begins with a brief overview of temporal anaphora and distinguishes various analyses of temporal adverbs based on the observation that they can be discourse transparent . Subsequently, the chapter considers the view that now is a temporal pronoun that is discourse transparent. This analysis faces several problems, and the chapter proceeds to look at two analyses that attempt to fix them, ultimately adopting the view that now seeks salient result states. In light of this view, the chapter briefly considers (i) whether now is perspectival in nature and (ii) what we can learn from looking at how now is translated into other languages. The chapter ends by discussing outstanding questions concerning the interaction between temporal adverbs and aspect.

The semantics of Mandarin futurates

“…Two types of time adverbs are of particular interest. Time adverbs such as tomorrow, last week, yesterday are sensitive to the utterance time (Dowty 1982;Klein 1994;Altshuler 2020, among others). For example, the set of intervals denoted by tomorrow includes the intervals that are within the day after "today", i.e., the day that contains the utterance time.…”

Formal properties of now revisited

“…If the character were incomplete, as in the case of true demonstratives, we would still need to say what further contextual supplementation is required to determine the content given the character. The proposal is first developed in our Altshuler & Stojnić 2015, reported by Altshuler (2016: ch. 2), Carter & Altshuler (2017) and Altshuler (2020). Here, we build on Stojnić et al 2013, Stojnić 2016, 2018, Stojnić 2021.…”