We are happy to announce the first talk of this decade by Britta Stolterfoht (University of Tübingen) next Thursday at the Semantics Colloquium. Please find an abstract below.
Title: Processing Temporality: Position, Tense & Aspect
Room: IG 4.301
Date: January 16th
Time: 4pm - 6pm
Processing Temporality: Position, Tense & Aspect
Britta Stolterfoht (University of Tübingen)
The study I will present investigates the interaction of tense, aspect and syntactic position of temporal adverbials in the interpretation of sentences that are ambiguous with regard to their temporal interpretation. Sentences with specific time-frame adverbials in German and English (e.g., in three hours”; see example in (1)) are ambiguous between a durative reading, given in (1a), in which the event takes place in the time interval specified by the adverbial, and an inceptive reading, given in (1b), in which the event will start after this time interval. A series of experiments on German showed that the syntactic position of a temporal adverbial as well as verbal tense influences sentence...