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Time as Acceptability of Events Kasia Jaszczolt University of Cambridge http://www.cus.cam.ac.uk/~kmj21 Chronos 7 , Antwerp, 18-20 September 2006. Summary. Time as epistemic modality: a brief overview and summarized arguments Modality as degrees of acceptability of the conveyed proposition
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Time as Acceptability of EventsKasia Jaszczolt University of Cambridgehttp://www.cus.cam.ac.uk/~kmj21Chronos 7, Antwerp, 18-20 September 2006
Summary • Time as epistemic modality: a brief overview and summarized arguments • Modality as degrees of acceptability of the conveyed proposition • Grice’s Acc operator • Event for Default Semantics: ACC e • Default Semantics: an introduction • A Default-Semantics analysis of temporality as modality
A series and B series ‘…I shall speak of the series of positions running from the far past through the near past to the present, and then from the present to the near future and the far future, as the A series. The series of positions which runs from earlier to later I shall call the B series.’ McTaggart (1908: 111).
‘Why do we believe that events are to be distinguished as past, present, and future? I conceive that the belief arises from distinctions in our own experience. At any moment I have certain perceptions, I have also the memory of certain other perceptions, and the anticipation of others again. The direct perception itself is a mental state qualitatively different from the memory or the anticipation of perceptions.’ McTaggart (1908: 127)
A-series: • tensed • time belongs to events • there is real change • A. Prior, P. Ludlow, J. Parsons, Q. Smith
B-series: • untensed • earlier-than/later-than relations • time is psychological and belongs to the observer • there is no change • B. Russell, H. Reichenbach, A. Einstein, D. H. Mellor, T. Sattig? Mellor: experience of time as accumulation of memories
Representing time in semantics:An assumption The categories of tense, aspect, and whole propositions are founded on mental representations of events, organised on non-temporal principles.
Questioning time • Moens and Steedman 1988; Steedman 1997: temporality is supervenient on perspective and contingency; tense and aspect systems are founded on the same conceptual primitives as evidentiality van Lambalgen and Hamm 2005: goals, planning, causation link the past with the present and the future. ‘[T]he linguistic coding of time is (…) driven by the future-oriented nature of our cognitive makeup’ (p. 13)
Parsons (2002, 2003): counterfactual theory of tense: truth-at-a-time replaced with truth-at-a-world. ‘M was wholly future and will be wholly past.’ ‘There is some past time such that, were it that time, M would be wholly future.’ ‘There is some future time such that, were it that time, M would be wholly past.’
Time as degree of detachment from the content: proposition, sentence, event…
Semantic/pragmatic detachment as modality Epistemic modality ‘refers to a judgement of the speaker: a proposition is judged to be uncertain or probable relative to some judgement(s). …epistemic modality concerns (has scope over) the whole proposition.’ van der Auwera and Plungian (1998: 81-82)
Modality vs. evidentiality Inferential evidentiality overlaps with epistemic necessity (cf. van der Auwera and Plungian 1998) vs. ‘the grammatical means of expressing information source’. ‘To be considered as an evidential, a morpheme has to have ‘source of information’ as its core meaning; that is, the unmarked, or default interpretation’. Aikhenvald (2004: xi, 3).
Futurity as modality • Ludlow (1999): the future is modality understood as predictability or potentiality (‘disposition of the world’) • Fleischman (1982): future is closely related to irrealis or nonfactive modality and deontic modality (bidirectional semantic shift: modals tense modals • remodalization cycle (van der Auwera and Plungian 1998): participant-external necessity the future epistemic necessity
Pastness as modality • Ludlow (1999): ‘past-tense morphology’ is an evidential marker – an assumption compatible with A-theory • Thomason (2002): pastness as historical necessity: if w1t w2, then w1 and w2 share the same past up to and including t. Historical possibilities diminish monotonically with the passage of time.
Futurity and the uses of the English will: two interrelated problems (1) Tom will go to Brussels on Friday. (regular future) (2) On Friday Tom is going to Brussels. (futurative progressive) (3) On Friday (This Friday) Tom goes to Brussels. (‘tenseless future’, Dowty 1979) (4) Tom is going to go to Brussels on Friday.
Clearly modal uses of will: (5) Tom will be in Brussels now. (epistemic necessity) (6) Tom will sometimes smoke at the dinner table just to annoy Sue. (dispositional necessity)
Planning and predictability (7) Mary is drawing a rabbit. ?(8) Mary is feeling unwell tomorrow night. ?(9) Mary feels unwell tomorrow night.
Temporality and tense in DRT (Kamp and Reyle 1993) • Temporality and tense in Default Semantics (Jaszczolt 2003, 2005, 2006)
‘The algorithm must represent the temporal information that is contained in the tense of a sentence and in its temporal adverb (if there is one).’ Kamp & Reyle (1993: 512) Cf. the feature TENSE
(10) Michel n’est pas là. Il sera toujours au lit. (11) There’s the doorbell: that’ll be the delivery boy.
Gradation of epistemic modality: strength of informative intention
The Past • Tom went to Brussels yesterday. (simple past) … • Tom would have gone to Brussels by then. (epistemic necessity past/inferential evidentiality) … • Tom may have gone to Brussels yesterday. (epistemic possibility past) … • This is what happened yesterday. Tom goes to Brussels, meets Mary at the station, and says… (past of narration)
The Past: Towards a typology INP inferential necessity past (‘would have gone’) [ACCΔinp e]WS, CPI 1 INP ENP ?ENP epistemic necessity past (subsuming a set of constructions of different degree of intention and modality) ?EPP epistemic possibility past (subsuming a set of constructions of different degree of intention and modality)
Grice’s (2001) Equivocality Thesis: Modals are univocal across the practical/ alethic divide. [→ deontic/epistemic] Acc – modal operator, ‘it is (rationally) acceptable that’
Acc ￂp ‘it is acceptable that it is the case that p’ Acc ! p ‘it is acceptable that let it be that p’ Operator on propositions or other abstract objects?
Grice’s Modified Occam’s Razor (1978): Do not multiply senses beyond necessity. – against semantic ambiguity sense-generality, underdetermined semantics Default Semantics (Jaszczolt 2005)
Pragmatic information, such as the output of pragmatic inference or defaults, contributes to the truth-conditional content. • The representation of the truth-conditional content is a merger of information from (i) word meaning and sentence structure, (ii) (conscious) pragmatic processes, and (iii) default meanings. • Merger representations have truth conditions.
Default Semantics uses an adapted and extended formalism of DRT but applies it to the output of the merger of these sources of meaning.
Truth-conditional semantics (DRT, DS) or truth-conditional pragmatics (F. Recanati)? top-down pragmatic processes Compositional semantic theory of acts of communication
Truth-conditional pragmatics (e.g. Recanati 2003, 2004): truth value is predicated of an utterance – what is said by the speaker. ‘I haven’t eaten.’ Problem: degree of the contextual contribution (contextualism)
Principle of compositionality for merger representations: The meaning of the act of communication is a function of the meaning of the words, the sentence structure (WS), defaults (CD and SCD 1), and conscious pragmatic inference (CPI 1).
ACC as operator on events and states ACC e ACCΦ*m e ACCΔn e ‘it is acceptable, to the degree n, that it is the case that e’
Kamp, van Genabith & Reyle (forthc.): Discourse referents for individuals, times, events, and states (the universe of a model M). ‘Whether any one of these categories can be reduced to any combination of the others is left open.’ (p. 108).
Events and the A-series How many events took place in the last hour? ‘It is not part of linguistics to decide whether all matter is atomic or all happenings are reducible to little granules of process. Indeed, if contemporary physical theories are to be believed, such ultimate questions are basically incoherent.’ Bach (1986: 68)
Granularity of events • The origin of the dispute: Ramsey (1927), Davidson (1967) [ Parsons (1990), Landman (2000)]; Kim (1976) • Kim (1976): events are linguistically differentiated (stabbing vs. violent stabbing vs. knifing…). Temporal particulars. • Montague (1969): events are properties of moments or intervals of time • Chisholm (1970): events are states of affairs • Schein (2002): events vs. finely-grained scenes cf. also Pianesi and Varzi 2000
Events and time • Asher (2000): atemporal facts vs. temporal events • van Lambalgen and Hamm (2005): an event type + time = an event token Rothstein (2004): events are theoretical constructs, made up according to the current needs: ‘Mary built three houses in three months.’ Default Semantics: • finely-grained events (cf. Kim) • time-independent events (cf. Chisholm)
