The semantics of the simple tenses and full-verb inversion in English
A story of shared epistemic schemas
This paper offers a fresh perspective on (restrictions on) aspectual coercion, thereby focusing on the essentially
epistemic import of aspectual constructions. The case study that I will discuss is the unexpected use of the simple tenses for
ongoing event reports in sentences involving full-verb inversion. I will argue that this attestation of the simple present/past in
inverted sentences can be analyzed as a kind of aspectual mismatch between the higher-order construction and the embedded tenses.
Yet at a more basic, epistemic level of analysis, there is no mismatch: the full-verb inversion construction and the embedded
tenses are similar in the sense that both report events that are conceived of as fully and instantly identifiable.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Full-verb inversion in English: A brief introduction
- 3.The aspectual properties of full-verb inversion: Corpus data and native speaker elicitations
- 4.Mismatch at the aspectual level
- 5.The shared epistemic schemas of full-verb inversion and the simple tenses
- 5.1The epistemic semantics of the simple tenses
- 5.2Full and instant identifiability and full-verb inversion
- 6.Constraints on aspectual coercion: An epistemic motivation
- 7.Conclusion
- Notes
-
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