Apparently QV involves quantification by a sentential adverb over something. A theory of QV needs to answer, first, what the adverb actually quantifies over, and second, why this quantification has the distribution it does. This paper rejects Berman’s 1991 theory of QV and supports that of Utpal Lahiri (1991, 1998). Berman takes QV to be quantification over the WH variable in the interrogative,...

The paper offers a new type of approach to the semantic phenomenon of adverbial aspect shift within the framework of finitestate temporal semantics. The heart of the proposal is a supervaluational concept of underspecification, and the idea of treating the meanings of temporal prepositions as dynamic presuppositions. The simple shifting algorithm used in the present approach derives the correct...

This paper a t t e m p t s to demons t r a t e the u s e f u l n e s s f o r Machine T r a n s l a t i o n of a c a s e o r i e n t e d d e s c r i p t i o n of the s y n t a c t i c and the semant ic b e h a v i o r of a d v e r b i a l and p r e p o s i t i o n a l c o n s t r u c t i o n s . Ee aim to modify and r e f i n e the e x i s t i n g d e s c r i p t i o h s of adverbs and p r e p o...

Complex sentences involving adverbial clauses appear in children's speech at about three years of age yet children have difficulty comprehending these sentences well into the school years. To date, the reasons for these difficulties are unclear, largely because previous studies have tended to focus on only sub-types of adverbial clauses, or have tested only limited theoretical models. In this p...

Recent work in functional and cognitive linguistics has argued and presented evidence that the positioning of adverbial clauses is motivated by competing pressures from syntactic parsing, discourse pragmatics, and semantics. Continuing this line of research, the current paper investigates the e¤ect of the iconicity principle on the positioning of temporal adverbial clauses. The iconicity princi...