Perfects as Feature Shifting Operators

450 Pages·2015·1.49 MB·English

Perfects as Feature Shifting Operators
Hans Kamp, Uwe Reyle and Antje Rossdeutscher
Institut fu¨r maschinelle Sprachverarbeitung
Universita¨t Stuttgart
D-70174 Azenberstr. 12
December 9, 2015
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Contents
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4 CONTENTS
Preface
This ms. was started as a paper, but then it grew to its current length an
even now it isn’t quite finished. What follows are a few words describing the
project and its origins and a makeshift table of contents, in the hope that
this will provide some minimal orientation to anybody who wants to look
into this in its present state.
Theoriginalpurposeofwhatfollowswastodealwithaproblemthatarisesfor
‘pure result state’ accounts of the perfect, which treat perfects as operators
that transform event and state descriptions into descriptions of correspond-
ing result states and make these the target of location in time by tenses and
temporal adverbs. In the form in which we endorsed this approach for many
years ((Kamp and Reyle 1993), (Reyle, Rossdeutscher and Kamp 2007)) it
entails that a sentence like I have submitted my essay today can be true even
if the submission itself took place before today. Some speakers argue that
this sentence has a reading on which can be true on such a scenario. or
others this is hard or impossible. But from all the evidence available to us
on this point it seems to us that the sentence must have a reading on which
it entails that ms. was submitted on the day of utterance. (It is a further
matter, but one which does not directly affect the need for a correction to
our earlier result state account, whether the sentence does or does not have
an interpretation that does not require this.)
The following pages are the result of trying to implement one solution to
this problem. When they are described in these innocuously sounding terms
their number must seem excessive, and quite possibly absurd. What hap-
pened is something like this: As we proceeded to work out the details of
the solution that we are proposing, it became necessary to rethink many of
the assumptions we had been making over the years about how the semantic
representations of sentence constituents are built from the representations of
their constituents. So much of what follows is concerned with such ‘com-
positionality’ questions, partly pertaining to what happens below the point
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6 CONTENTS
where perfects make their semantic contributions and in another part to
what happens above it. And, more importantly, as we went along we be-
came increasingly aware of the many interactions between perfects and other
constituents that a viable theory of perfects at this juncture of time should
have something to say about. The interactions that we had been paying
almost exclusive attention to in our earlier work on temporal reference were
those between perfects and ‘temporal locating adverbs’ like in 2001, on the
first of March, next week ortoday and, in (Reyle et al. 2007), also ‘frequency
adverbs’ such as often. But questions on what is the right account of perfects
turn heavily on interactions between perfects and other types of temporal ex-
pressions, most notably with English since- and for-phrases (and their coun-
terparts in other languages) and the interaction between perfects and various
forms of quantification. The importance of the first of these interactions has
rightly been stressed by many who have studied perfects in recent times and
provides what appear to be the strongest arguments in favour of so-called
’Extended Now’ accounts, or ’Perfect Time Span’ accounts. It seems that
it is to accounts of this type that most current students of the perfect sub-
scribe. (Certainly this is so for those who have recently expressed themselves
on the topic in print.) In view of this no proposal for an account of perfects
that is (or appears to be) of a significantly different kind can afford to ignore
the question how it compares to accounts of the ’Perfect Time Span’ type.
But to make a responsible job of this it is necessary to articulate precisely
what the compositional semantics is of since- and for-phrases, and that in a
way which is consistent with the general architecture for the construction of
semantic representations adopted here. That proved a task in itself, and one
that could be carried out only after a good dal else was in place.
Theinteractionbetweenperfectsandquantificationisimportantforaslightly
different reason. These interactions too play a significant part in current dis-
cussions of the perfect, but a different one. Rather than pointing in the
direction of one account rather than another, they complicate the picture
of the different things that sentences with perfects can mean – i.e. of the
spectrum of different truth conditions that is covered by sentences involving
such interactions. The perhaps most familiar and simplest distinction that
points in the direction of this complication is the distinction between ’the
existential perfect’ and ‘the universal perfect’. In many cases this and simi-
lar distinctions underestimate the complexity ad diversity of the interaction
between perfects and the various devices for quantification that are found
in languages like English and that they also tend to be misplaced within
the general landscape of construction involving perfects. Only when the full
complexity of this matter has been acknowledged and been located within
CONTENTS 7
a general theory of the semantics of constructions with perfects will it be
possible to account for many data that otherwise remain puzzling and re-
calcitrant. At the time of writing this temporary guideline (May 2012) the
chapter on ‘quantificational perfects’ still has to be written, and the same
is true for a chapter about adverb attachment, an issue that rears its head
almost from the start and that has been kept out of sight, often by force,
during the chapters of the present incomplete draft.
What follows is therefore still seriously incomplete. But not only that. Ev-
erything that follows will have to be gone over and combed through at least
one more time; and a good part of the ms., Ch. 5 onwards, is a truly first
draft, driven by the urgent (and yet unfulfilled) desire to get everything we
think needs saying on this topic down in some form or other. For this reason
too what follows cannot be more, and should not be taken as more, than an
interim report.
A final reason why this text is as long as it is already at this point is that an
account of perfects cannot be just an account of present perfects. All serious
current semantic accounts of perfects assume that the perfect forms are, just
as the traditional terminology implies, composed of the perfect as such (how-
ever it is to be analysed) and a finite or infinite tense form. Thus a present
perfect is as the term says the present tense of a perfect, a past perfect a
perfect in the past tense and so on. That is also one of the attractions of
result state analyses of perfects (both the defective version we adhered to for
so long and the one developed below): the perfect itself always involves the
same operation – that changing event descriptions into descriptions of their
result states – irrespective of whether the form is that of a present, past,
future, infinitival or gerundival perfect and the tense, whether present, past
or future, infinitival or gerundival, then locates this result state according to
the same principles that are operative when the tense is not part of perfect
verb morphology.
Thisisonereasonforwantingatheoryofall, andnotjustofpresent, perfects.
But unfortunately the generalisation from present to arbitrary perfects is not
as straightforward as the general assessment of the last paragraph suggests.
For at least the English Present differs from the other English perfect forms
in certain ways that also set it aside from the present perfects of other lan-
guages (such as, in particular, German, the other language that is targeted
in the investigations reported here). Since some of the notorious puzzles
about the English Present Perfect have to do with these special properties
and any current account of the English Perfect is therefore expected to have
8 CONTENTS
something to say about what this difference between the Present Perfect
and other perfects (the non-present perfects of English and all the perfects
of most other languages) consists in, a detailed exploration of non-perfect
forms is a sine qua non too. This by itself proved a non-trivial task, which
accounts for about one third of the present ms.
In the provisional table of contents that follows we have lifted all the subdivi-
sionsonelevelup. ‘Sections’havebeenpromotedto‘Chapters’, ‘Subsections’
to ‘Sections’ and so on all the way down. (You will be dismayed to learn that
the phrase ‘all the way down’ is not used vacuously.) In this, but only in this
way, doesthetableofcontentsdepartfromthecontentsthatitisthetableof.
Chapter 1
Introduction
Whatisaperfect? Thewayyouwillwanttoanswerthisquestionmaydepend
on your perspective. If your primary concerns are syntax and morphology,
then you are likely to want an answer in morphological terms; if your central
interest is semantics, then you will be looking for a characterisation in terms
of meaning – something like a common contribution that all perfects make to
the meanings of the sentences in which they occur, and that set them apart,
irrespective of how they happen to be realised morphologically, from other
sentence constituents.
For many languages a morphological definition seems to work well enough.
This is so in particular for languages with analytic perfects – languages in
whichperfectsareformedascombinationsofanauxiliaryverb(whichwewill
refer to as a perfect auxiliary) and a certain form of the verb itself, usually re-
ferred to as its past participle. Among the languages with analytic perfects
are English (with perfect auxiliary have), German (which has two perfect
auxiliaries, haben (‘have’) and sein (‘be’)), French (which is like English in
that it has only perfect auxiliary, the verb avoir, which normally translates
into have when both verbs are used as main verbs) and many other European
languages as well. In any of these languages the finite perfects are those in
which the perfect auxiliary bears finite tense (and the infinite perfects are
those in which it does not). The tense morphology of the auxiliary suggests
a correspondence between non-perfect and perfect verb forms: to the simple
present tense corresponds the present perfect (in which the tense of the per-
fect auxiliary is a simple present), past perfect corresponds to simple past,
future perfect to simple future, and so on.
There are also languages in which perfects are synthetic. In these languages
the perfect is not formed with the help of auxiliaries, but only through mor-
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10 CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION
phological marking on the verb itself. For such languages morphology-based
definitions of their ‘perfects’ can be somewhat less transparent than for lan-
guageswithanalyticperfects, becauseofentanglementsbetweenperfectmor-
phologyandtensemorphology. However, sincethispaperfocussesonEnglish
and German, synthetic perfects will be of no direct concern to us, and we
won’t mention them any more.
Straightforward as morphological definitions of the perfect may be for lan-
guages in which the perfect is expressed analytically, a full justification
doesn’t seem possible without some appeal to meaning. Usually languages
with analytic perfects also have other constructions involving auxiliaries and
non-finite verb forms. And that raises the question what it is that makes
an auxiliary a ‘perfect auxiliary’ (as opposed to, say, a future or modal aux-
iliary)? The only way to answer that question is by some kind of reference
to meaning. One way to do this is to focus on sentences in which the aux-
iliary is in the simple present: If an utterance of such a sentence at a time
t is judged to be true only if an eventuality (i.e. event or state) of the kind
described by the sentence occurred at some time before t, then this can be
taken as an indication that its auxiliary is a perfect auxiliary. The appeal
to meaning need not necessarily take this particular form. But some such
appeal is inevitable; for the concept of a perfect is ultimately a semantic one;
so a merely morphological definition, devoid of any kind of semantic back-up,
just cannot carry the entire load by itself.
For a semanticist, morphology is first and foremost the implementation of an
underlying semantic concept. He will look for a primary characterisation of
perfects in terms of meaning, and, more specifically, for a characterisation in
termsofthecontributionsthatperfectsmaketothemeaningsofthesentences
which they are part. The quest for such a characterisation has led to a range
of different proposals ((McCoard 1978), (Dowty 1979), (Mittwoch 1988),
(Moens and Steedman 1988a), (Parsons 1990), (Klein 1992), (Klein 1994),
(Klein 2000), (Iatridou, Anagnastopolou and Izvorski 2001), (Musan 2002),
(von Stechow 2002), (Alexiadou, Rathert and von Stechow 2003b), (Portner
2003), (Swart2007), (Higginbotham2008), (Rothstein2008), (Higginbotham
2009)). Among these proposals there are those which treat perfects as de-
scriptions of result states: a perfect of a given verb phrase VP describes
a state that results from the occurrence of an eventuality of the kind de-
scribed by VP. This result state is then located by tense in the same way
that tenses locate the eventualities1 described by the verb phrases of non-
1 We follow what has become a tradition in the tense and aspect literature: to use