Temporal Views as Abstract Relations

Many natural languages use prepositions to mark relations between entities of various kinds – between physical entities and their spatial locations, between temporal entities and their temporal locations, between abstract entities of various kinds (e.g. between ideas and their ‘mental locations’). In the current paper I will show that the consequences of using prepositions to relate temporal entities emerge naturally from the basic interpretations of the prepositions themselves together with a very weak logic of events, where I take it that prepositions denote abstract relations whose significance only emerges when properties of the related items are taken into consideration. 1. Prepositions as abstract relations “in: preposition expressing inclusion or position within limits of space, time, circumstance, etc.” Pocket Oxford Dictionary of Current English, 1970 Consider the following sets of sentences: (1) a. He drove from London to Paris.1 1(1a) to (1c) are taken from [1]. b. He drove from dawn to dusk. c. He copied it from his hard drive to a floppy. d. I got the RAE results from the Guardian2. (2) a. I saw a man in the park. b. I saw him in January. c. I’ve got an idea for a paper about time in my mind, but I don’t know how it will work out. d. I’ve got 230 people in my AI class next term. (3) a. I saw him at the station. b. I saw him at two o’clock. c. He seemed to be at his wits’ end. All of these, apart perhaps from the very last one, seem to be entirely natural. The prepositions that appear in them, however, clearly link very different kinds of things. In the (a) examples the ground for the relation denoted by the PP is a physical location, in the (b) examples it is a temporal location, in the (c) and (d) examples it seems to be some sort of abstract entity. Is one of these relations primary, with the others as some kind of metaphorical extension, or is there some common element which gets extended in different ways depending on the nature of the ground? This is not, in this paper, a question about the history of prepositions, either over the evolution of the language across the centuries or within each language learner. It may be that, at least historically, the spatial interpretations of some of these prepositions come first, but there is very little evidence that the spatial readings predominate in the language as it is used today (see Appendix A for an extract from the first 9000 noun-in-noun triples in the BNC. There is very little indication here that spatial or temporal uses of ‘in’ are particularly common3). The aim of the current paper is to see whether it is possible to provide a single uniform account of the meaning of prepositions like the ones in (1)–(3) which shows how the contribution they make to the meaning of the sentence, and in particular to the temporal structure of the reported event, arises from a simple core meaning for the preposition in conjunction with the key properties of the entities being related. 2because they ranked UMIST higher than anyone else did! 3The process of extracting these was not sensitive to the possibility that the PP modifies a VP rather than a nominal, but in any case it is the nature of the ground that has most effect on the type of relation, and there will not be much wrong with the choice of ground in these examples.