Chapter published in:
Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2018: Selected papers from 'Going Romance' 32, Utrecht
Edited by Sergio Baauw, Frank Drijkoningen and Luisa Meroni
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 357] 2021
► pp. 71–96

Chapter 4
The varieties of temporal anaphora and temporal coincidence

| Nantes University | CNRS
This paper explores the temporal construals of perfective vs. imperfective aspect in Sequence of Tense contexts in Spanish and French, in particular, under ellipsis. The distribution of past-shifted vs. simultaneous, as well as sloppy vs. strict, temporal construals is taken to support extending to viewpoint aspect a referential approach to tense, as Demirdache & Uribe-Etxebarria (2014) contend. I derive the distribution of simultaneous vs. past-shifted readings by extending their analysis of imperfective vs. perfective to embedded contexts. The intricate distribution of strict vs. sloppy (simultaneous, as well as past-shifted) readings is explained by extending the LF-parallelism constraint on ellipsis (Fox 2000) – specifically, the assumption that structural parallelism yields sloppy readings, while referential parallelism yields strict readings – to temporal anaphora under ellipsis.
Keywords: perfective, imperfective, sequence of tense, simultaneous past, past-shifting, temporal ellipsis, temporal binding, strict past, sloppy past, temporal parallelism
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Temporal anaphora and viewpoint aspect
    • 2.1Temporal syntax of tense & aspect
    • 2.2More viewpoints: Imperfective and perfective
    • 2.3Temporal anaphora
      • 2.3.1Temporal coreference
      • 2.3.2Temporal binding
  • 3.Imperfective vs. perfective past in embedded contexts
    • 3.1Sequence of Tense (SoT)
    • 3.2Why perfective (unlike imperfective) enforces past-shifting
  • 4.Strict vs. sloppy temporal construals
    • 4.1Temporal ellipsis: Structural vs. referential parallelism
    • 4.2Perfective past in ellipsis contexts
    • 4.3Imperfective past in ellipsis contexts
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 17 December 2021
https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.357.04dem
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