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Manuscripts
Remembering Paolo Casalegno: Contexts, Quantification and Generic Sentences. A. Bonomi, Indices and contexts of discourse.
Semantical remarks on the progressive readings of the imperfective (presented at the CONFERENCE ON SYNTAX AND SEMANTICS OF TENSE AND MOOD SELECTION, Bergamo, 2-4 July, 1998)
Finding one’s way in the labyrinth of forking paths (The Semantics of the future tense: Part I.)
Evaluating future-tensed sentences in changing contexts (with F. Del Prete, 2008)
Imperfect Propositions (email me for the last version of the paper, December 2012)
Abstract. The
aim of this paper is to provide a unified semantic analysis for three important
readings of the Italian Imperfetto (and Presente): the PROGressive, the
HABitual, and the FUTurate reading. To highlight the role of the utterance context in setting the relevant parameters of interpretation,
explicit temporal adverbials are left out of the scene and prominence is given
to the situations where the context provides the temporal information required
to discriminate between alternative readings, by exploiting a single
logical form. The
paper is organized as follows. After a short presentation of the data, I discuss
some intuitive features of imperfectivity by focusing on the fact that the conclusion
of an event or series of events is left open. This indeterminacy with respect
to the future of a given moment is formalized by resorting to a branching time
model. So, a unitary treatment is proposed for the three main readings of
tenses such as Presente and Imperfetto and for an intriguing side effect that,
in some particular circumstances, makes a "perfective" reading
possible. Since
contexts have a key role in this reconstruction of imperfectivity, the final
sections of the paper are devoted to the consideration of the temporal
parameters to which the evaluation of an utterance is relativized. In order to
account, in particular, for the FUT reading, an utterance context is
represented an evolving structure, where different backgrounds of information can be
associated to different moments in a non-monotonic way. Non-persistent truths (email me for the last version of the paper, December 2012) Abstract. I start from
Evans' criticism of temporalism, based on
the claim that it does not 'provide for the stable evaluation of utterances'. So, I try to show
that, with suitable qualifications, assuming the possibility of evaluations yielding different truth values
at different times is not an "eccentric" move (as suggested by Evans).
I briefly consider Prior's metaphysical arguments in favour of the
asymmetry between past and future and I suggest that, independently of these arguments, there are linguistic reasons in support of such an assumption. In particular,
there are some future oriented
statements which (unlike past oriented statements) are conceived of by speakers
as intrinsically revisable and which
require a non-monotonic characterization of the changing backgrounds of
information selected by the time flow. As shown by some peculiar uses of phase
adverbs like 'still' and 'no longer', variability in terms of truth-value
assignation is a distinctive feature of this kind of statement.
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