Vera Hohaus (Manchester / Tübingen)
The syntax of embedding and the temporal interpretation of attitude complements
This talk is part of a larger cross-linguistic enterprise to identify the syntactic, lexical and compositional choices in the grammar of a language that determine the temporal interpretation of embedded structures (see, more recently, Ogihara & Sharvit 2012, Sharvit 2018, Bochnak, Hohaus & Mucha, accepted). To this enterprise, we contribute here the view from Turkish, which encodes complementation as nominalization. More specifically, we will argue that -DIK complements are definite DPs. As such, their temporal interpretation is independent of the matrix evaluation time and resolved pragmatically.
References:
Ogihara, T. & Y. Sharvit (2012). Embedded tenses. In R. I. Binnick (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Tense and Aspect, pp. 638–668. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sharvit, Y. (2018). Sequence of tense: Syntax, semantics, pragmatics. In P. Patel-Grosz, P. G. Grosz & S. Zobel (eds.), Pronouns in embedded contexts at the syntax-semantics interface, pp. 215–247. Berlin: Springer.
Bochna, R., V. Hohaus & A. Mucha (accepted). Variation in tense and aspect, and the temporal interpretation of complement clauses. Accepted for publication in Journal of Semantics.