This study examines the forms and meanings of tensed and non-tensed clauses in English, and proposes an analysis of them that is 'Reichenbachian' in spirit and syntactic in orientation. The study considers tensed verb forms in simple sentences, focussing on 'present', 'future', and 'perfect' forms and their interaction with adverbials of temporal location; and those in complement, relative, and temporal clause constructions. It also considers three types of non-tensed verb forms--infinitives, gerunds, and 'bare infinitives'--in verb complements. / The study demonstrates that the interpretation of tensed and non-tensed forms can be described in terms of Reichenbach's (1947) temporal schemata, which express relations between 'S' ('speech time'), 'R' ('reference time'), and 'E' ('situation time'). However, its central claim is that the tensed forms themselves are 'temporally underspecified', encoding relations between 'S' and 'R', and leaving the relation between 'R' and 'E' and the location and duration of both of these intervals to be determined by lexical properties of the verb and its arguments, temporal adverbials, and context. Non-tensed verbs forms have a similar syntactic representation, differing primarily in not fully encoding a relation between 'S' and 'R'. This claim is cashed out in terms of two devices: a feature system that expresses tenses as particular values of the feature matrix (Anterior, Posterior); and a device of 'tense linking', based on Higginbotham's (e.g. 1983) proposal for binding theory, which associates verbs with temporal adverbials or tensed Infl, and one (tensed or non-tensed) Infl with a higher one.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.34452 |
| Date | January 1996 |
| Creators | Shaer, Benjamin M. |
| Contributors | Gillon, Brendan (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Doctor of Philosophy (Department of Linguistics.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001554471, proquestno: NQ30384, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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