Past Event

Dependant Past: sorting out modality, adjuncts, and embedded clauses

Dr. Bronwyn M. Bjorkman
(Queen’s University)

There are at least two domains where it has been proposed that past inflection is “uninterpretable” or “fake”, because it does not contribute its ordinary back-shifted interpretation: sequence-of-tense

(SOT) phenomena, and counterfactuals (CFs). Though rarely compared directly, both have been analyzed as cases where pastness is formally uninterpretable, its appearance being morphologically dependent on the main clause.

(1) a. SOT: My sister told me that her friend liked frogs.

b. CF: If I liked frogs, I would keep some in a terrarium.

Though previous literature has focused on their similarities, this talk focuses on differences in the interpretations of past inflection in SOT and CFs, particularly their interaction with lexical and viewpoint aspect. It is well known, for example, that SOT effects arise only with embedded stative or imperfective clauses—even in SOT languages like English, embedded events or perfective clauses exhibit straighforward past-under-past readings. CFs, by contrast, never exhibit past-under-past readings, regardless of aspect or eventuality type.

Building on previous work, I argue that these differences arise because only CFs involve temporally uninterpreted, morphologically dependent past inflection—SOT, by contrast, involves a true semantic past tense. Establishing this conclusion, however, requires factoring out other differences between SOT and CF contexts, in particular the presence of modality, and the status of if-clauses as adjuncts.

About the Presenter

Dr. Bronwyn Bjorkman received her PhD from MIT in 2011. She has been a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow and a Banting Fellow at the University of Toronto, and is now Assistant Professor at Queen’s University. Her work focuses on syntactic and morphological theory.

This event is sponsored by the School of Linguistics and Language Studies