Temporal prepositions and temporal generalized quantifiers

Ian Pratt, Nissim Francez

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    Abstract

    In this paper, we show how the problem of accounting for the semantics of temporal preposition phrases (tPPs) leads us to some surprising insights into the semantics of temporal expressions in general. Specifically, we argue that a systematic treatment of English tPPs is greatly facilitated if we endow our meaning assignments with context variables, a device which allows a tPP to restrict domains of quantification arising elsewhere in a sentence. We observe that the use of context variables implies that tPPs can modify expressions in two ways, and we use this observation to predict the behaviour of tPPs whose complements are themselves modified by other tPPs. © 2001 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)187-222
    Number of pages35
    JournalLinguistics and Philosophy
    Volume24
    Issue number2
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 2001

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