Lecture 14
Ling 442
Exercises (part 1)
(2) on p. 173
a. Max drew his pistol.
b.Donald heated the solution.
c. Donald heated the solution to 70 degrees.
d.Donald heated the solution for five minutes.
e.Tim doodled on the table cloth listlessly.
f. A strange mushroom appeared on the lawn.
Exercises (part 2)
A real story. (1) was uttered by a native speaker,
and was misunderstood by another native
speaker. Can you identify the two readings?
1.I didn’t sleep all weekend.
Hint: all weekend is a universal quantifier over a
set of times, and it interacts with negation.
Analyzing Vendler’s
four verb classes
• State: Subject has an appropriate property
continuously
• Activity: Subject engages in a (more or less)
homogeneous action continuously. Subject DOES
something
• Accomplishment: Subject DOES something and
this causes some state to come into existence
• Achievement: Some state comes into existence
The subinterval property
• A sentence f has the subinterval property iff the
truth of f at a time t entails its truth at all
subintervals of t.
• States have this property (in idealized
circumstances).
• Kearns says that activities have the subinterval
property. This is true only to a degree: we have to
limit the sizes of subintervals. E.g. walking events
(and running events) have minimal sizes.
The English perfect (part 1)
• is not compatible with adveribials that
indicate past time.
1.*I have lost my wallet yesterday.
indicates a resultant state/experience caused
by a past event (or current relevance)
2.I have been to the Grand Canyon.
3.Princeton has been visited by Einstein.
Vs. # Einstein has visited Princeton.
The English perfect (part 2)
can indicate ‘hot news’
1.Russia has invaded Poland.
can indicate a continuing state with a state
predicate
2.Mary has lived in Seattle since 1976.
3.Mary has been living in Seattle since 1976.
(The “continuing state” reading is obligatory in
(3).)
The English perfect (part 3)
• existential reading (rather than a “definite past
time” reading)
4. Have you seen the movie?
In a question, the type of event described is still
doable now (Baker 1989)
• (asked of a person who has nearly been run down
by a reckless driver who immediately left the
scene)
5. Did you see the guy’s license number?
6. # Have you seen the guy’s license number?
The English perfect (part 4)
• Tense-like interpretations in forms other than
the present perfect
1. Having lost his wallet yesterday, John is now
in big trouble.
2. John seems to have lost his wallet yesterday.
3. John said last Sunday that he had lost his
wallet the day before.
4. Mary may have played the piano yesterday.
The simple past
• First hypothesis: an existential quantifier over
(the set of) all past times.
That is, John left means that there is a past time
at which John’s leaving occurs.
But is this right? Partee (1973) questioned this
idea by presenting (1). She shows that (2) and (3)
are both wrong renditions.
1. I didn’t turn off the stove.
2. ~ t [t is a past time & I turn off the stove at t]
3. t [t is a past time & ~ I turn off the stove at t]
The simple past
• Partee’s idea: past tense is like a deictic pronoun.
It denotes a particular past time salient in the
context.
• ~ I turn off the stove at t (where t denotes a past
time)
• Partee is correct in that a sentence in the simple
past tense indicates reference to a contextually
salient past time. But the question is whether
that should correspond to the time of the event
indicated by the verb.
The simple past (part 2)
If the salient past time is supplied by an overt or
covert adverbial (like yesterday), then past
tense itself may not provide a salient past
interval itself.
1. Mary coughed at least once yesterday.
2. t [t is part of yesterday & Mary coughs at t]
Reichenbach’s theory
• Has three time points: S(peech), E(vent),
R(eference).
• Provides an appealing account of the intuitive
difference between the simple past and the
past perfect.
• John left.
E,R ____ S
• John had left. E___ R ___ S
• Provides an account of the difference between
the simple past and the present perfect, too.
Narrative and Tense/Aspect
Puzzle: What is the difference between (1) and
(2) (in truth conditions)?
1. Mary smiled.
2. Mary was smiling.
You need a discourse context to explain the
difference between them. (There are not
appreciable truth conditional differences
between them.)