Arnim von Stechow. “Temporal comparatives: früher ‘earlier’/später ‘later’”. Talk presented at the workshop ‘Tense and Mood’, Stuttgart, December 3 2005.
There is a rich literatur about before/after, but I am not aware of a comparable literature about earlier/later. The talk develops a degree semantics for the antonyms früh ‘early’ and spät ‘late’ and derives the meanings of the comparative forms for these adjectives. I defend Heim’s negation theory of antonymy. I define a new positive operator Pos that applies to the positive and the negative pole of an antonym pair without any ad hoc stipulation. Each context determines a delineation interval L that separates the negative from the positive pole of an antonymy pair. Pos applied to a set of degrees D says that D holds of every degree in the interval L. A number of non trivial constructions are analysed.
The relation between ‘already/still’ and ‘earlier/later’ is clearly spelled out in DRT in Smessaert and ter Meulen (2004), ‘Temporal reasoning with aspectual adverbs’, Linguistics and Philosophy 27: 209-261. The inferences studied in AvS’s paper are all provably valid in our DRT account.
February 11th, 2006, at 8:52 am #