Temporal Interpretation of Non-finite Adjuncts in English

Abstract

There are adjunct clauses in English that have no overt tense morphology. For example, the underlined parts of the sentences - No one knows what Joe did before coming to this town or While painting the old house, they thought they saw a ghost rambling in the basement, are non-finite adjuncts. The matrix clauses in English exhibit tense morphology and thus have direct access to the time of utterance for temporal interpretation. In contrast, non-finite adjuncts contain "no component sensitive to the time of utterance" (Richards 1982: 67), and fail to have direct access to the speech time. They must be linked in some way to the matrix tense to get temporally interpreted. This paper addresses to the question of how such NFA's are interpreted temporally. The paper will show that neither the operator analysis nor the deletion analysis is successful in handling the temporal interpretation of NFA's. Adopting En~'s binding analysis of tense that treats tenses as referential expressions that denote times, I will propose a set of interpretation rules of NFA's. In doing so I will examine En~'s claim that the interpretation of tenses is subject to syntactic conditions that are reminiscent of the binding conditions for the interpretation of anaphors and pronominals. I will show that NFA's are interpreted in terms of semantic inclusion and that this semantic relation is not subject to any significant syntactic constraints.