Tense, Aspect and Adjuncts: An analysis of ‘By’ temporal adjuncts

Michael Thomas

Abstract for paper presented at
GURT '07
Georgetown University
March 8-11 2007

Aspectually sensitive temporal adjuncts play an important role in aspectual diagnostics in much work on aspectual theory (see Dowty, 1977; Comrie, 1985; Hornstein, 1990). However the semantic constraints of these adjuncts remains understudied. In this study the use of by temporal adjuncts in the Wall Street Journal, BNC, and Switchboard corpus is analyzed. Intuitions about the relation of by temporal adjuncts and the past perfect tense found in grammars (Quirk et. al., 1985; Huddleston et. al., 2002) and ESL teaching materials is shown to be at variance with how the by temporal adjuncts are actually used in the corpora. By temporal adjuncts found in the data rarely occur with main clauses coded by the perfect tense. An adequate analysis requires reference to grammatical and lexical aspect, frame semantics, and coercion. This paper presents a unified analysis of by temporal adjuncts functioning as state selectors which presuppose a pragmatic frame. By temporal adjuncts interact with both the lexical aspect of the main verb and the grammatical aspect of the main clause in order to set up a relationship between a transition anterior to the time indicated within the by phrase and a state which applies at the time indicated by the by phrase. By temporal adjuncts also presuppose a pragmatic frame. The state which is selected for is understood in relation to a contextually evoked frame of an expected course of events. This suggests by temporal adjuncts should be included as a member of the set of contextual operators as described in Kay (1997).

Michael Thomas is a PhD student in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and a member of the Colorado Research in Linguistics editorial board. He can be reached at:Michael.Thomas@Colorado.edu.