Speaker: Caroline Heycock (University of Edinburgh) & Elise Newman (MIT)
Title: When to revisit? investigating (un)ambiguity in temporal clauses
Time: Wednesday, March 13th, 1pm – 2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract: Ever since the seminal work of Geis in the 1970s, it has been known that temporal adverbial clauses in English (and a number of other languages) show the same kind of ambiguities as also observed in wh-questions and (even more relevantly) relative clauses, so that a sentence like “She arrived just when I predicted she would arrive” can mean either that her arrival coincided with my act of predicting, or with the time given in the prediction. This follows fairly directly from an analysis of such temporal adverbial clauses as a type of free relative clause denoting a definite description of a time, which can be formed syntactically by A’-movement of a temporal operator, or whatever analysis is given to such long-distance dependencies. Here we’d like to report on joint work in progress (Caroline Heycock, Elise Newman, Rob Truswell) where we investigating cases of temporal clauses where long-distance movement seems to be either excluded or at the least heavily disfavoured, and exploring the possibility that the data motivate a distinction between temporal clauses that are descriptions of time intervals and those that are descriptions of events.