Please join us this Friday as Orest Xherija from the Linguistics Department presents work on the semantics of temporal connectives.

Title: Before without after: nonveridicality, disjunction and context dependence

Date and time: Friday, November 13, 10:30 a.m. – 12:20 p.m.

Location: Rosenwald 208 (Linguistics seminar room)

Abstract:

In this talk I will sketch a new, crosslinguistic semantics for the temporal connective before based on empirical observations from a number of languages. The semantics of before has been a longstanding problem in formal semantics and pragmatics due to the numerous properties that this connective seems to possess: (a) it allows for veridical, nonveridical and antiveridical readings of the before-headed clause (which reading we have depends (mostly) on context); (b) it licenses NPIs (in contrast to the alleged dual after); (c) it can license strong NPIs (Giannakidou 1998, for relevant examples from Modern Greek); (d) it seems to place an anti-PAST restriction on the verb of the before-headed clause (a fact that is observed in a number of diverse languages including Modern Greek, Albanian, Turkish and Japanese); (e) it appears to force a veridical reading when preceded by a measure phrase like three minutes. After showing that previous accounts (Ogihara 1995, Sánchez-Valencia et al. 1994, Condoravdi 2010, Krifka 2010 inter multa alia) have missed some of these empirical observations in attempting to formally characterize the semantics of before, I will sketch an account in which before is a function from contexts to meanings. This denotation aims to capture the numerous crosslinguistically robust properties of this connective with a uniform account that is language-independent. In sketching this account, I will provide evidence for the need of at least two lexical entries for before, to account for cases in which before is followed by a TP and cases in which it is followed by a DP, a fact that has not been addressed in any of the previous accounts.