Aspect Selectors, Scales and Contextual Operators: An Analysis of by Temporal Adjuncts

Many temporal adjuncts select for specific aspectual classes; these adjuncts include measure adverbials like for an hour and interval adverbials like in an hour. While such adjuncts have traditionally served as diagnostics of telicity, it is only relatively recently that aspectual theorists have elucidated the relationship between the scalar-semantic meanings of these adjuncts and the internal structure of the event representations to which they apply (see Dowty 1979, Herweg 1991, Krifka 1998, inter alia). Krifka (1998) proposes that both measure adverbials and interval adverbials operate on representations that involve motion along a path. It seems entirely plausible that these adverbials should have path-based meanings, since they concern the ‘run times’ of processes. It is less clear whether path schemas can be applied to the semantics of aspectually sensitive temporal adverbs in general, and particularly those that denote time points. One such adverbial is the by time adverbial (BTA), which will be the focus of our attention in this paper. An example of the BTA is given in (1):