Ron Artstein: “Quantificational arguments in temporal adjunct clauses”:http://www.cs.technion.ac.il/~artstein/quant.pdf. (34 pp.) July 2003.
bq. Quantificational arguments can take scope outside of temporal adjunct clauses: the sentence few secretaries cried after each executive resigned allows two scope orderings for the quantificational NPs few secretaries and each executive. Following Pratt and Francez (2001), temporal clauses are analyzed as temporal generalized quantifiers, which arise through an implicit temporal determiner meaning in the adjunct clause; a flexible architecture for the semantics permits the application of this determiner before a quantificational argument, giving the argument scope outside its clause. The semantics derives three kinds of readings for temporal clauses: dependent-time, where the evaluation times of the matrix clause depend on a quantifier inside the temporal clause; single-time, where the matrix clause is evaluated at a single time regardless of quantifiers in the temporal clause; and aggregatetime, where the matrix clause is evaluated in an interval which encompasses the individual times quantified over by the temporal clause. The latter kind of reading is necessary for temporal clauses that are modified internally by a temporal adverbial, as in Bill resigned when John disappeared every Friday; it also yields a natural account of sentences with long-distance temporal dependencies, as in I saw Mary in New York before she claimed that she would arrive (Geis 1970).
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