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Maura O’Leary’s student colloquium talk- It’s About Time: A long-expected relationship between nouns and tense

Apr 29, 2022 @ 11:00 am - 1:00 pm
Haines 118,

It’s About Time: A long-expected relationship between nouns and tense
Maura O’Leary (UCLA)

It has been well established that the property times of verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositional phrases, participle phrases, and relative clauses are all interpreted relative to the time argument introduced by the nearest scoping lambda abstractor (e.g., Abusch 1988, Percus 2000, Ogihara 2003, Keshet 2008) – generally meaning that these property times overlap the reference time defined by sentential tense. However, nominal property times have eluded such a clear-cut distribution; it seems that they need not overlap the tense’s reference time, nor even the utterance time – leading some to conclude that nouns, unlike all other predicates, are altogether unaffected by tense (e.g., Enç 1981, 1986; Musan 1995, 1999; Tonhauser 2002, 2006, 2020). In this talk, I show that the property times of nouns actually are defined relative to the time argument introduced by the nearest scoping lambda abstractor, arguing that this fact has been obscured over the years by the existence of two nominal lexical aspectual classes, which each derive their property time from their time argument in a unique way. With this confound accounted for, I propose a single locality constraint which accounts for the binding of the time arguments of all predicate types. (This content, which is only meant to account for predicates introducing novel referents, comprises 2/3 of my dissertation – the remaining 1/3 accounts for the property times of nouns used in longer discourses to refer to familiar referents.)

Details

Date:
Apr 29, 2022
Time:
11:00 am - 1:00 pm
Event Category:

Venue

Haines 118