A puzzle about until and the Present Perfect Anastasia ... - CiteSeerX

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time: it cannot locate it in the past, since it is non-past, but it can't locate an event in .... adne's losing her keys, e happened at a time t' prior to the speech time n,.
A puzzle about until and the Present Perfect Anastasia Giannakidou 1. Introduction This paper is concerned with the status of sentences combining a present perfect and an UNTIL adverbial, like the ones below from Greek and English. I use UNTIL as a generic label for the connective crosslinguistically. (1)

* I Ariadne exi zisi stoParisi mexri tora. the Ariadne has lived in Paris until now ‘?Ariadne has lived in Paris until now.’

(2)

* I Ariadne exi xasi ta klidia tis mexri tora. the Ariadne has lost the keys hers until now ‘* Ariadne has lost her keys until now.’

Until and its Greek counterpart mexri seem to create an anomaly when they modify an eventuality in the present perfect.1 The anomaly is weaker in English than it is in Greek with a stative verb like live and until now, but notice that any other time prior to now gives a result as bad as in Greek: (3)

* Ariadne has lived in Paris until 1998.

The anomaly is quite puzzling in the context of the quite standard assumptions that (a) perfect eventualities denote result states (McCoard 1978, Dowty 1979, Vlach 1983, Kamp and Reyle 1993), and (b) UNTIL is a stative modifier. Both assumptions would predict unobstructed compatibility between UNTIL phrases and the perfect. The observed incompatibility becomes even more intriguing when we see that it is removed if we insert negation, or iterative adverbials like tris fores ‘three times’: (4)

a. I Ariadne dhen exi zisi stoParisimexri tora. the Ariadne not has lived in Paris until now ‘?Ariadne has not lived in Paris until now.’

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b. I Ariadne dhen exi xasi ta klidia the Ariadne not has lost the keys ‘Ariadne has not lost her keys yet.’ (5)

a. I Ariadne exi zisi the Ariadne has lived ‘Ariadne had lived in Paris b. I Ariadne exi xasi the Ariadne has lost

tis mexri tora. hers until now

sto Parisitris fores mexri tora. in Paris three times until now three times until now.’ ta klidia tis tris fores the keys hers three times

mexri tora. until now ‘Ariadne has lost her keys three times until now.’ In (4) UNTIL becomes fine if the present perfect is negated (though again, the status of the English sentence is slightly different from that of the Greek one); in (5) we witness an improvement with the addition of an iterative adverbial. Why should we have these contrasts? In this paper, I will try to answer this question by exploring how the semantics of the perfect in Greek and English interacts with the constraints imposed by UNTIL adverbials. I will focus primarily on Greek, where the contrast seems to be the clearest. In the last section I show that the proposed explanations accommodate English easily. The incompatibility of UNTIL and the present perfect will be explained as a semantic clash between the semantics of durative UNTIL, which requires that a state extend through all subintervals introduced by it, and the perfect, which contains both an event and a result state, thereby creating a conflict with durative UNTIL. The improvements suggest that the result state is suppressed, enabling only event predication to map onto the interval contributed by UNTIL. Two premises will be crucial to this explanation: (a) that UNTIL has three meanings, among which a purely temporal one; and (b) that the aspectual information that comes from the participle is important: in Greek, where the participle is perfective, the perfect always contains an event (even with stative verbs). But in English, where the participle in aspectually unspecified, purely stative interpretations are also allowed. The particular differences among the two languages will be shown to follow from this central difference. The paper is organized as follows. In section 2, I discuss the semantics of until and its Greek counterpart mexri. It will be shown that UNTIL connectives express three possible meanings, one of which contributes a purely temporal dimension. In section 3, I discuss the aspectual system of Greek, concentrating on the perfective-imperfective contrast which is

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observed in all finite verb forms. Perfect participles, on the other hand, are only perfective. This fact will be decisive for the particular meaning of the Greek perfect and its difference from the English one. In section 4, I concentrate on the semantics of the Greek and English present perfect within the extended now approach (McCoard 1978, Dowty 1979). We see that the Greek present perfect is an existential perfect (the perfect of result included), with stative as well as eventive verbs, because of the perfective morphology of the participle. Finally, in section 5, I revisit the data presented here and show that they follow from the joint analyses I proposed for UNTIL and the perfect. 2. The various meanings of until In this section, we see that the meaning of UNTIL crosslinguistically is actually a cluster of three related meanings: a durative meaning; an eventive meaning which is triggered by negation; and a purely temporal meaning that appears primarily in future sentences, but is also licensed with the perfect, as we shall see in section 5. The common core in all cases is that UNTIL contributes an interval or a time scale upon which eventualities are mapped: states (durative UNTIL), or events (the other two meanings). 2.1. Durative until Durative until is known to modify durative eventualities – states or activities (Karttunen 1974, Mittwoch 1977, Hitzeman 1991, de Swart 1996 and references therein): (6)

The princess slept until midnight.

(7)

The princess was writing a letter until midnight.

Eventive eventualities, on the other hand, are generally incompatible with until: (8)

a. * The princess arrived until midnight. b. *The princess wrote a novel until she married Bill.

I call achievements and accomplishments ‘eventives’, and do not distinguish between the two unless it matters (e.g. in the discussion of the perfect). States and activities will be referred to as ‘statives’.

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The generalization, then, is that until is compatible with statives but not with eventive verb forms. In Giannakidou 2002, I showed that the Greek counterpart of until, mexri, exhibits exactly the same property: (9)

I the

prigipisa princess

egrafe ena grama wrote.imperf. a letter

mexri ta until the

mesanixta. midnight ‘The princess was writing a letter until midnight.’ (10) I prigipisa kimotane mexri ta the princess slept.imperf. until the ‘The princess was sleeping until midnight.’ (11) * I prigipisa eftase mexri ta the princess arrived.perf. until the ‘* The princess arrived until midnight.’ (12) * I the

prigipisa princess

egrapse ena wrote.perf. a

mesanixta. midnight mesanixta. midnight

mithistorima novel

mexri pu until that

pandeftike. married ‘* The princess wrote a novel until she married.’ The durativity of UNTIL can be captured as follows. UNTIL introduces an interval with a well-defined endpoint (Hitzeman 1991), which is supplied by the clock expression contained in the until-phrase. (I do not discuss clausal until, and assume that what I say for phrasal until carries over to its clausal counterpart.). The verb contributes a state which is then mapped onto the until-interval, as indicated below: (13) ...______s: sleep_______]______... midnight States are homogeneous, i.e. they exhibit the subinterval property (Bennett and Partee 1978): the predicate characterizing the state is taken to be true at all subintervals contained in the until interval. This is reflected in the semantics in (14), from de Swart 1996 (building on earlier

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work by Kamp 1968; for the AT-relation see Krifka 1989): (14) semantics for durative until for α: λs [P(s) ∧ ∃t AT (s,t)]; β: λt’Q (t’) [[until (α,β)]] = λs∃t∃t’∃t’’’ [P(s) ∧ AT (s,t’’’) ∧ Q(t’) ∧ t ⊆ t’’’∧ ∀t’’ [[t ≤ t’’ < t’] → ∃s’[s’ ⊆ s ∧ P(s’) ∧ AT (s’, t’’)]]] The until interval t''' extends from some (not necessarily well defined) point t to a point t' which is the time of the clock description Q of the until phrase. This semantics also captures the scalar nature of until. The connective introduces a range of values on the time scale. These are the times t'' which precede the time t'. The verb contributes a state P, and P is asserted to hold at all subintervals t'' prior to t'. This semantics implies that there is a change of state at t', and that P does not hold at t'. This, however, is a Q-implicature in the sense of Horn (1989), albeit a strong one; as such it can be cancelled, as in (15): (15) Sure, the princess slept until midnight. In fact she only woke up at 2 am. Hence it seems appropriate to include t' in the P-holding interval; I indicate this by using square brackets in (13). The scalar condition must then be altered as t’’ ≤ t' instead of the existing t’’ < t’. For the purposes of comparison, I will also simplify the above definition and use the one below: (16) durative UNTIL [[mexri Q]] = λP λs ∃t∃t’[ P(s,t) ∧ Q(t') ∧ RB (t,t') ∧ ∀ t’’ [(t''⊆t ∧ t''≤ t’) → P (s,t'')]], where RB stands for ‘right boundary’ The left boundary of t remains unspecified, but this is not always so, as we shall see later (section 5) in the discussion of boundary adverbials. The data in (6)- (8) can now be easily explained: (6) and (7) are fine because they contain statives: the condition that P holds is true for all relevant subintervals t''. On the other hand, the eventives in (8) are not compatible with until because events are either quantized (accomplishments) or have no duration at all (achievements). In either case, the UNTIL requirement is not met.

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2.2. Eventive NPI until This second meaning is triggered when UNTIL occurs with negation, and corresponds to Karttunen's (1977) punctual UNTIL. In this meaning UNTIL is an NPI triggered by negation and other antiveridical operators (e.g. without; Giannakidou 1998, Zwarts 1995). According to Karttunen, NPI-until, because of its punctuality, yields an inchoative meaning with stative verbs5: (17) The princess did not sleep until midnight. = ‘The princess fell asleep at midnight.’ (18) The princess fell asleep at midnight and not before that. ∃e ∃t [midnight (t) ∧ t< n ∧ fall-asleep (princess, e,t )] ∧ ¬∃e'∃t' [t∈C ∧ t'