Ogihara Tense, Attitudes, and Scope

1996
ISBN: 978-94-015-8609-2
Verlag: Springer Netherland
Format: PDF
Kopierschutz: 1 - PDF Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, Band 58, 282 Seiten, eBook

Reihe: Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy

is a model-theoretic inquiry into the semantics of tense in natural language. The book presents the view that the semantic contribution of tense is made in relation to structurally higher expressions (the `relative tense theory') and argues against the view that tenses are all indexicals. This idea is formally encoded as a analysis of attitudes, originally proposed by Lewis, coupled with a sequence-of-tense rule posited for English. An auxiliary proposal is made to account for some exceptional cases (e.g. so-called double-access sentences), which invokes attitudes about temporal entities (states or intervals). Since the proposed account assumes that the interpretation of tense is structure-dependent, it also correctly predicts scope interactions between tenses and NPs.
is intended for scholars and graduate students in formal semantics, syntax-semantics interface, philosophy of language and Japanese linguistics.

Zielgruppe

Research

Autoren/Hrsg.

Ogihara, T.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of abbreviations. Preface. 1. Introduction. 2. Tense and temporal adverbials in simple sentences. 3. Previous analyses of tenses in embedded clauses. 4. Sequence-of-tense phenomena in complement clauses. 5. Sequence-of-tense phenomena in adjunct clauses. 6. Tense and de re attitudes. Appendix: The syntax and semantics of tenses in English and Japanese. References. Index.