Edited by Sergio Baauw, Frank Drijkoningen and Luisa Meroni
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 357] 2021
► pp. 71–96
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.