Atle Grønn

Future vs. Present in Russian and English Adjunct Clauses

We treat the interpretation and motivate the morphology of tense in adjunct clauses in English and Russian (relative clauses, before/after/when-clauses) with a future matrix verb. The main findings of our paper are the following: 1. English has a simultaneous reading in present adjuncts embedded under will. This follows from our SOT parameter. Russian present adjuncts under budet or the synthetic perfective future can only have a deictic interpretation. 2. The syntax of Russian temporal adjunct clauses (do/posle togo kak…) shows overt parts that had to be stipulated for English as covert in earlier papers. We are thus able to present a neat and straightforward analysis of Russian temporal adjuncts.

An Amazing Come-Back: A Counterfactual Imperfective in Russian

The paper shows how the semantically underspecified imperfective aspect in Russian becomes associated with counterfactual complete events in specific contexts, notably in chess annotations (Restan 1989), while the perfective invariably denotes factual complete events. The counterfactual flavour of the construction invites a comparison with more standard counterfactual conditionals, including some discussion of the imperfective and counterfactuality in French. I show that the “counterfactual imperfective” in Russian differs from ordinary counterfactual conditionals, which are characterized by a semantically empty past tense. This subtle distinction leads to a further division of pragmatic labour between the form “imperfective past” (hypotheses in the past) and the “subjunctive (“by”) perfective past” (hypotheses in the present/future). The analysis is couched in Bidirectional Optimality Theory (Blutner 2000), which provides an ideal framework for analyzing non-compositional form-meaning optimization and pragmatic strengthening.

Tense in Adjuncts Part 2: Temporal Adverbial Clauses

Part 1 of this article treats tense in relative clauses in English, Russian and Japanese. The temporal center in relative clauses can always be anaphoric, and sometimes it has to be the anaphoric Tpro. In Part 2, we investigate tense in temporal adverbial clauses (TACs) headed by ‘after’, ‘before’ and ‘when’. We argue for the following points: 1. English TAC Tense is bound in Present adjuncts under matrix ‘will’, in other constructions the TAC Tense is deictic. Tense licensing is non-local in bound constructions, while in deictic constructions it is local. 2. Russian TAC Tense is deictic, and the tense licensing is local. 3. Japanese TAC Tense is bound. We have a ‘tenseless’ construction in the adjunct, and tense licensing is local.

Tense in Adjuncts Part 1: Relative Clauses

Part 1 of Tense in Adjuncts presents a compositional analysis of tense in relative clauses (RCs). The languages under investigation are English, Russian, and Japanese. We introduce the syntax and semantics of tense and the theory of feature transmission under variable binding, which mediates between syntax/semantics and morphology. In sequence of tense languages such as English, the morphology of the tense in a RC will be licensed by a non-local tense if the RC is embedded under will. In other constructions, the RC tense is licensed by a local tense. In non-sequence of tense languages, the tense in the RC is also determined by a local tense. The paper says which factors are responsible for the tense distribution in the different languages under consideration.

A, The, Another: A Game of Same and Different

Indefinites face competition at two levels: Presupposition and content. The antipresupposition hypothesis predicts that they signal the opposite of familiarity, or uniqueness, namely, novelty, or non-uniqueness. At the level of descriptive content, they are pressured from two sides: definites expressing identity and another phrases expressing difference, and Gricean reasoning predicts that indefinites signal both difference and identity and are infelicitous when definites and another phrases are felicitous. However, occasionally a space opens between the and another, for a to fill. This is in part due to conditions handicapping the or another semantically, in part to another’s phonological handicap. The division of labor between determiners in the field of difference and sameness is thus the result of an intricate competition. We model this competition in a version of game-theoretic pragmatics.

The semantics of the “experiential imperfective” in a unified account of the imperfective in Russian

In this paper, I present a formal semantic analysis of the experiential reading of the imperfective in Russian. Following Klein 1995, I claim that aspect is a temporal relation between an assertion time and the event time, with the imperfective denoting a relation where the assertion time is temporally included in the event time. I further claim that the imperfective is characterised by the subinterval property. This property implies that the imperfective can only relate to on-going processes or states. One such state is the experiential state, which is central to the experiential reading. Moreover, in order to maintain that the imperfective in this case denotes an inclusion relation between the assertion time (e.g. the utterance time) and the experiential state, I will claim that the event must be coerced into an experiential state. The present analysis also has implications for the interpretation of past tense in Russian. I will claim that past tense in the case of the experiential imperfective actually behaves like a perfect, i.e. the assertion time is located after the event time. This is compatible with the aspectual operator locating the assertion time within the experiential state of the event. Thus, the interaction of aspect and tense largely explains the data under consideration.