Thursday, March 21, 2013

Time takes forever

Continuing from Temporality in Natural Language....
 6. Logical representations: should sentence meanings explicitly quantify over times and/or events, or should they have tense operators akin to the propositional operators familiar from modal logic? (vcvp: which operators? past, present, future? much as I like operators, are they enough?)
7. Aspect: what is the significance of constructions like the perfect I have lost
my watch
and the progressive John was crossing the road? (vcvp: significant as they may be, not now...)
8. Aspectual class and coercion: processes vs. states and events..(vcvp:definitely punting)
9. Temporal and nominal constitution: collective/distributive distinctions (vcvp:the same..)
10. Nominal tense: nominal predicates do not normally carry an explicit temporal marking, like verbal ones do, but an individual can be a child at one time and an adult at another. How is their temporal interpretation determined?
11. Temporal adverbials and connectives: how do adverbials interact with tense, aspect and aspectual class? (vcvp: is there a list? how do know if we have most of them?)
12. Sequence of tense: in John said Mary went to London, why is Mary’s going to London prior to John’s reported utterance? (vcvp: how much of this can the language tell us about?)
13. Modals, conditionals and the future: there is a close connection between time and modality. Conditionals too interact with time and tense in complex ways. (vcvp: how to make the minimum number of mistakes on that?)
14. Generics: does a syntactically present tense, but generic, sentence like Lions are mammals make any temporal reference, or does it express an atemporal truth? (vcvp: Similarly the command Play Avatar! is this atemporal or a present or future tense form?)

Anna and Paola in Dagstuhl.

No comments:

Post a Comment