Speaker: Guillaume Thomas
Title: The role of topic times in the computation of temporal implicatures: evidence from Mbyá.
Date/Time: Thursday, Mar 1, 12:30-1:45p
Location: 32-D461
(1) and (2) both entail that there is a time in the past of the time of utterance (TU) at which John is a teacher. However, (2) appears to entail that John is not a teacher at TU, while (1) only implicates it. In addition, (2) is infelicitous in a context in which John is dead at the time of utterance, contrary to (1).
(1) John was a teacher.
(2) John is an ex-teacher.
One might try to give a unified analysis of the past tense and ex-, but since one is a tense and the other a nominal modifier, one might as well be content with an analysis that hard-wires the additional properties of ex- in its denotation. Of course, if the past tense and ex- were synonymous, one would feel more pressure to come up with a unified analysis. As it turns out, this is the case in Guarani Mbyá, as illustrated in (3) and (4), which are interpreted as (1) and (2), respectively:
(3) Juan o-iko va’e-kue ñombo’ea.
Juan 3-be REL-PAST teacher
Juan was a teacher.(4) Juan ñombo’ea-kue
Juan teacher-PAST
Juan is an ex-teacher.I propose that -kue is a relative past tense in (3) and (4), and that its additional properties in (4) are due to the interaction of the past tense with independent constraints on the temporal interpretation of NPs. In this talk, I will focus on the inference that Juan is not a teacher at TU, which I argue is a scalar implicature triggered by -kue. The challenge is to explain why this implicature is obligatory in (4), while it can be blocked in (3). Doing so will lead us to a discussion of the role of discourse topics in the restriction of the domain of quantification of tenses. Time permitting, I will also give an analysis of the inference that Juan is alive at TU in (4).