A syntax-semantics interface for tense and aspect in French∗

Contemporary studies of the semantics of tense and aspect tend to rely on syntactic hypotheses that are at odds with those of a phrase-structure based and lexicalist approach to syntax, such as that embodied in HPSG. For instance, de Swart (1998) explicitly assumes that tense relations originate in a syntactic position distinct from that of the head verb of the clause; and the approach to aspectuality detailed in Verkuyl (1993, 1999) relies crucially on the hypothesis that (aspectually relevant) adjuncts occur outside of the basic clause—an assumption which is at odds with recent adjuncts-as-complements analyses (see e.g. Bouma et al. (2001)). The general goal of this paper is to show by example that there is no incompatibility between HPSG syntax and the semantics of tense and aspect, and that a careful consideration of the syntax-semantics interface sheds new light on the nature of aspectual phenomena. I will focus on the analysis of tense, adjuncts and aspect shift in French. The first section reviews the analysis Henriëtte de Swart has been advocating for these phenomena (de Swart, 1998, 2000), with particular emphasis on so-called aspectual coercion operators. It will be shown that the distribution of these operators in semantic representations is not trivial, and is best accounted for by assuming that these operators are licensed by the presence of particular lexical information in the clause. In the second section, I present an HPSG analysis of tense and aspect at the syntax-semantics interface. The analysis relies on Minimal Recursion Semantics (Copestake et al., 2000) to relate standard syntactic structures with de Swart-style semantic representations. The analysis has two crucial features: first, it assumes that the semantic contribution of tense originates in the verb’s semantic representation, despite the fact that tense can get wide scope over other semantic elements. Second, it allows the occurrence of implicit aspectual operators to be controlled by the verb’s tense, which accounts for their peculiar distribution.