Semantic Partition and the Ambiguity of Sentences Containing Temporal Adverbials

Edinburgh EH8 9LW Scotland It has often been observed that sentences such as (1) are ambiguous: (1) Mary has lived in Amsterdam for three years. Sentence (1) has a reading in which there is some three-year interval in the past during which Mary lived in Amsterdam, and a reading in which Mary lives in Amsterdam at speech time and has done so for the three years preceding speech time. I will argue that this ambiguity is also present in sentences in the simple tenses, and that a uniied treatment of for (as well as other temporal adverbials) is possible once it is recognised that temporal adverbials are interpreted diierently depending on their syntactic position. Rather than attributing the ambiguity of such sentences to lexical ambiguity of the adverbial, I argue that the interpretation of a sentence with a temporal adverbial is aaected by the partition of the sentence into two portions which are interpreted as parts of diierent semantic correlates, much like Topic/Comment and Background/Focus constructions.