Aspect in Episodic, Adverbially Quantified and Habitual Dynamic Contexts in Polish, Czech and Russian

Home , Imperfective aspect, Perfective aspect

Aspect in episodic, adverbially quantified and habitual dynamic contexts in Polish, Czech and Russian.

Dorota Klimek MPhil Programme in Linguistics, Utrecht Institute of Linguistics UiL OTS/LOT Utrecht University, 2006. Supervisor: prof. Henriette de Swart

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

First of all, I would like to express my appreciation to prof. Henriette de Swart for her supervision, for her kind help and support, for her valuable comments on this thesis. It was a great pleasure to cooperate with her as a researcher and as a person.

I would like to thank my Ph.D. supervisor prof. dr. hab. Boena Rozwadowska for inspiring my interest in linguistics and introducing me to the world of science.

I would like to thank everybody at the department of linguistics of the University of Utrecht for excellent courses and for creating an intellectually rich and friendly environment. All I learned will be a precious asset in my future research.

I am very grateful to the Nuffic organization for a Huygens grant and to the UiL OTS Institute of Linguistics, in particular to the director Martine Everaert and MA Programme coordinators Maaike Schorlemmer and Sergio Baauw, for their help in arranging a grant for my studies at the MPhil Programme in Linguistics.

Thanks are due to my language informants Nadya Goldberg (Russian), Jakub Dotlacil, Petr Biskup (Czech), Min Que (Chinese) and all my Polish informants: Adam Biały, Agnieszka Dziołak, Anna Kijak, Maja Lubaska, Krzysztof Migdalski, Ewa Rudnicka, Tomasz Stpie, Barbara Tomaszewicz and my family.

Contents Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………….. 5 1 Theoretical setting ………………………………………………………………………….. 7 1.1 Event-based semantics……………………………………………………………….. 7 1.1.1 An ontology of eventualities (Bach 1981, Partee 1984, Parsons 1990) ……. 10 1.1.2 Applications of event-based semantics and its advantages over

interval-based semantics…………………………………………………….. 11 1.2 Discourse Representation Theory (DRT)……………………………………………. 13 1.4 Contingency relations in the interpretation of temporal discourse…………………… 14 1.5 Pragmatic Discourse Relations (Lascarides and Asher 1993, 2003)…………………. 16 1.6 An overview of the thesis…………………………………………………………….. 18

2 The semantics of perfective/imperfective aspect and its interaction with rhetorical relations in episodic complex temporal sentences with when-temporal adjunct clauses in Polish, Czech and Russian as compared to English ……………………………………….. 20

2.1 Connective –when and aspect ………………………………………………… 20 2.1.1 Heinämäki (1978)...... 20 2.1.2 Hinrichs (1986)...... 21 2.1.3 De Swart (1999)...... 23 2.2 De Swart’s (1998) theory of aspect ………………………………………………….. 26 2.2.1 Aspectual operators in Polish, Czech and Russian…………………………… 28 2.2.2 Imperfective: a plural operator or an unboundedness operator?……………... 31 2.3 Specificity of perfective and imperfective aspects in dynamic contexts …………….. 37

2.3.1 The interaction of perfective and imperfective aspect with the Elaboration

rhetorical relation…………………………………………………………….. 37

2.3.2 The interaction of perfective aspect with the Explanation

rhetorical relation……………………………………………………………... 41

2.3.3 The semantic underscpecification of imperfective aspect in the quantified

Result rhetorical context …………………………………………………….. 44 2.4 Conclusions …………………………………………………………………………... 45 3 Quantified eventualities in Russian, Czech and Polish: A bi-directional OT approach 47 3.1 Preliminaries about Quantifying Adverbs (QAs) …………………………………… 47 3.2 Optimality Theory Syntax and Semantics…………………………………………… 51 3.3 An OT syntax approach to variation in expression of quantified temporal sentences

with when-adjunct clauses in Czech and Russian …………………………………… 52

3 3.3.1 Polish as a transitional zone – intralinguistic variation……………………… 56

3.4 Eventive interpetation of imperfective aspect. An OT semantics/pragmatics

approach ………………………………………………………………………………. 6 1

3.5 Conclusions …………………………………………………………………………... 63 4 The semantics of bare habitual contexts and their relation to aspect in Polish, Czech and Russian………………………………………………………………………………….. 65

4.1 How to disambiguate in favor of a habitual reading of complex temporal sentences in English and in Polish?………………………………………….. 66

4.2 The distribution of aspect in bare habitual complex temporal sentences in Polish, Russian and Czech……………………………………………………………………. 69

4.2.1 Recoverability in the process of communication and its importance in the expression of habituality …………………………………………………….. 78

4.3 The semantics of a HAB operator…………………………………………………….. 79 4.3.1 Ferreira’s (2005) approach to the semantics of bare habituals………………. 80 4.3.2 Definiteness in the nominal domain…………………………………………. 80 4.3.3 Can the semantics of a Hab operator be parallel to the semantics of the

sum plural definite determiner the? ………………………………………… 81 4.3.2.1 Sum plurality of bare habituals ………………………………………... 81

4.3.2.2 Maximality of bare habituals ………………………………………….. 82 4.3.4 A presuppositional character of definite descriptions ……………………….. 86

4.3.5 A non-quantificational nature of the HAB operator ……………………………… 88 4.4 Conclusions ……………………………………………………………………………….. 90

4 Introduction

Numerous discussions related to Slavic aspect focus primarily on static contexts and assume that aspect is a homogeneous phenomenon in all Slavic languages. This thesis presents a novel perspective on some facets of cross-linguistic and intralinguistic variation in the expression and interpretation of aspect in dynamic adverbially quantified and habitual contexts in Russian, Czech and Polish. The core assumption is that a primary role of aspect is to establish anaphoric links between subsequent discourse constituents. Since the coherence of temporal discourse is not only dependent on aspect but also on rhetorical relations holding between eventualities, it is reasonable to establish a uniform semantics for imperfective and perfective aspect and to investigate its specificity by testing to what extent it can be complemented with rhetorical reasoning in creating anaphoric links in temporal discourse. I assume that perfective is an overt quantizedness operator. It acts like a classifier in the nominal domain in that it restricts the denotation of a verb it operates on to a singleton set containing a quantized event. This explains why perfective is preferably interpreted as episodic. Its quantized reference results in the individuation of a reference time. Hence, it is expected that perfective will necessarily update the reference time and consequently it will block or restrain the influence of rhetorical relations on temporal ordering of subsequent eventualities. This is in contrast to English simple past contexts which do not express an eventuality description morphologically thus leave it lexically underspecified and susceptible to rhetorical relations. On the other hand, imperfective aspect may denote episodic states or processes, (which have a mass-like denotation) or plural states, process and events in frequentative (quantified) contexts. Imperfective in both its uses imposes the requirement of cumulativity and divisiveness on its input eventuality, hence I refer to imperfective aspect as an unboundedness operator. Imperfective does not individuate a new reference time in temporal discourse and it is in some respects underspecified thus, as it will be demonstrated in chapter 2, it leaves space for pragmatic reasoning in the process of temporal discourse interpretation. Essentially, Russian, Czech and Polish display variation in the distribution of imperfective and perfective aspect in adverbially quantified complex temporal sentences related by a temporal connective when. In this thesis, I demonstrate that the observed patterns of crosslinguistic and intralinguistic variation including preferences in expression and interpretation arise from the interaction of ranked violable syntactic, semantic and pragmatic constraints as predicted by bi-directional Optimality Theory. An undeniable advantage of an Optimality Theory is that it has the capacity to integrate syntactic, semantic and pragmatic

5 rules which intermingle in the language production and interpretation. In other words, Optimality Theory is a theory of interfaces. It bridges the apparently distinct modules which form an intricate system leading to our fast, efficient and dynamic communication. The discussion of the different distribution of aspect in overtly quantified complex temporal sentences is extended to their bare habitual counterparts. One of the questions that is explored concerns the role imperfective aspect and normative modality in the process of recoverability of a tacit HAB operator. I present a critical overview of Bonomi’s (1995) proposal that in the absence of a specific adverb of quantification, the imperfective determines the universal and the perfective the existential reading. This leads to a study of another puzzling issue namely the occurence of perfective aspect (which as a quantizedness operator tends to individuate a reference time and is in most cases interpreted as episodic) in habitual contexts. It is argued that perfective bare habituals involve deontic modality. This assumption is motivated by an independent discussion of normative modality of indefinite singular generics proposed by Cohen (2001). Since I assume the presence of a tacit HAB operator, I present the most recent analysis of bare habituality proposed by Ferreira (2005) in which he treats a HAB operator as a sum plural definite operator over events. I agree that definiteness and bare habituality have sum plurality and maximality in common but I motivate why these two semantic characteristics are not sufficient to support Ferreira’s claim that HAB operator and a definite determiner the are semantically equivalent. For example unlike definites, habituals are non- presuppositional (modal) and second, unlike definites, bare habituals can be quantificational, in the sense that they regulate binary relations between sets.

6 Chapter 1

Theoretical setting

My discussion of a distribution and a semantics of aspect in episodic, adverbially quantified and bare habitual complex temporal sentences in Polish, Czech and Russian is rooted in the neo-Devidsonian event-based semantics, which treats eventualities on par with individuals as basic ontological entities of a model (Davidson 1969, Parsons 1990). I implement my discussion of Polish, Czech, Russian and English aspectual systems in De Swart’s model (1998) (cf. Moens and Steedman 1987) which is based on the idea that aspectual operators (overt or contextual) are eventuality description modifiers which map sets of eventualities of a certain type onto sets of eventualities of some other type, where the set of ontological entities consists of events, processes and states as in Partee (1984) and Bach (1986). To obtain a more complete understanding of tense, aspect and quantification in the temporal domain it is necessary to take a dynamic standpoint, hence I will adopt the theoretical tools from the Discourse Representation Theory (henceforth DRT) of Kamp and Rohrer (1983), Kamp and Reyle (1993) and its pragmatic development ie. Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT) proposed by Lascarides and Asher (1993, 2003) in the spirit of Hobbs (1978), Moens and Steedman (1987), Caenepeel (1989). The observed aspects of variation and the issues related to recoverablity in the process of optimization of interpretation will be dealt with in bi- directional Optimality Theory (OT) syntax/semantics/pragmatics terms.

1.1 Event-based semantics

In traditional atomic semantics, a sentence like Bastian loves Mary is considered to have a two-place verbal predicate love which has two arguments Bastian and Mary which is represented in (1):

(1) love (Bastian, Mary)

In his seminal study on ‘Individuation of events’, Davidson (1969) claims that verbs are more like common nouns than proper names in that they do not refer to particular actions but rather stand for kinds of actions and hence should be characterized as descriptions of events (in a

7 broad sense of the term event). Davidson assumes that every sentence contains an event argument variable (henceforth e-argument) which in the absence of any other source of quantification gets existentially bound by default. In this spirit, Parsons (1990) proposes that verbs translate as one-place predicates of events irrespective of their transitive or intransitive status and the participants in the action of loving, namely Bastian and Mary operate on the same event argument variable as separate conjuncts bound by the same existential quantifier. Consequently, in event-based semantics the sentence Bastian loves Mary is represented as in (2): (2) ∃e (Love (e) and Lover (e,Bastian) and Loved-one(e,Mary))

In event-based semantics not only verbs and participants, but also adverbs are treated as predicates of an e-argument. Decomposition involving separation of arguments and adverbs into their own conjuncts captures the entailment relations between sentences with adverbial modification shown in (3) and the respective formulas in (3’):

(3) a. Brutus stabbed Ceasar in the back with a knife. b. Brutus stabbed Ceasar in the back. c. Brutus stabbed Ceasar with a knife. d. Brutus stabbed Ceasar.

(3a) entails (3b) and (3c) and (3d). (3’) a. ∃e (stab(e) and Past(e) and Agent (e,Brutus) and Theme (e,Ceasar) and in-the-back(e) and with-a-knife(e)) æ b.∃e (stab(e) and Past(e) and Agent (e,Brutus) and Theme (e,Ceasar) and in-the-back(e)) and c. ∃e (stab(e) and Past(e) and Agent (e,Brutus) and Theme (e,Ceasar) and with-a-knife(e)) æ d. ∃e (stab(e) and Past(e) and Agent (e,Brutus) and Theme (e,Ceasar))

According to Davidson and Parsons, we capture these logical relationships by quantifying over an e-argument introduced by a verb and by treating the participants of an action denoted by this verb as well as adverbials modifying this verb as predicates of the e-argument which are all represented as separate conjuncts. Another argument for treating participants of an action as independent conjuncts comes from sentences of the type given in (4) adopted after

8 Schein (1993) as quoted in Herburger (2000: 8) and represented in neo-Davidsonian framework in (5):

(4) Three video games taught every quarterback exactly two new plays.

(5) ∃e ∃X (videogames(X) and |X| = 3 and Agent(e) = X)

and ∀y (quarterback(y) ∃e’ e’ ≤ e & Beneficiary(e’) = y) and

∃Z ( plays(Z) and |Z| = 2 and Theme (e’) = Z and teach(e’)) and

∀e’ (e’

∃Z (plays(Z) and |Z| = 2 and Theme (e’) = Z and teach(e’))

(Ferreira 2005:25-26)

As stated in Herburger (2000:9), the most salient reading of this sentence is such that there was a teaching event and three video games were the teachers and the result was that every quarterback learned two new games. In order to capture the distinction between what the video games do and what the quarterbacks do, it is necessary to separate the subject (three video games) and the object (quarterbacks) into their own event descriptions: video games do some teaching on the one hand and every quarterback learns two new plays on the other hand. If the subject is treated as denoting a separate set of events (carries its own e-argument) it is reasonable to treat it as a separate conjunct which is only indirectly linked to a verb through the existential quantifier binding all instances of e-arguments in all conjuncts. One of the arguments Davidson uses to motivate the treatment of events as ontological entities in a model is related to the fact that in the discourse example in (6) pronoun it refers to an event argument:

(6) John brought me chocolates. It was very kind of him.

Generally pronouns need to have referents which are salient in the previous context. Ferreira (2005) following Cooper (1979), Evans (1980), Heim (1990:166), points to the fact that an indirect linking between a pronoun and its referent is not enough to license its use in a discourse, as shown in (7):

9 (7) a. John has a wife. She is sitting next to him. b. John is married. ??She is sitting next to him.

Ferreira states that the use of she to refer to John’s wife in (7a) is perfectly fine while its use in (7b) is not (even though the existence of John’s wife can be inferred) since in the former context the antecedent sentence contains the indefinite description a wife which licenses an anaphoric pronoun but it is not the case in (7b). This observation about licensing of pronouns by some salient referent introduced explicitly in the previous context should be assumed for pronouns referring to events as well. If so, the sentence John kissed Mary should contain an expression denoting an event description, and that would definitely be the case if its verb phrase denoted a set of events, as represented in (8):

(8) y kiss x = x.y.e. kiss(e, y, x)

1.1.1 An ontology of eventualities (Bach 1981, Partee 1984, Parsons 1990)

In his extension of Davidson’s event-based semantic theory, Parsons (1990), following Bach (1981), and Partee (1984) adopts an extended ontology of eventualities including events, processes and states. Events can be characterized as happening and as having definite culminations, hence events are compatible with in-adverbials but not with for-adverbials, as shown in (9) for English1:

(9) Jack ate 7 cookies in 15 minutes/*for 15 minutes

In turn, states do not happen but occur/hold for varying amounts of time without culminating, while processes like events happen, but like states never culminate. The contrast between processes (as happenstances) and states (as occurences) follows from the fact that only process-, but not state-clauses can act as complements of observe-perception verb in English, as shown in (10):

(10) a. I was observing Mary crying, sleeping, working. b. #I was observing Mary worring/ liking John/ believing Jack.

1 For the discussion on whether in/for adverbials relate to situation aspect or to grammatical aspect cf. dissertations by Olga Borik (2002), Anna Młynarczyk (2004) and Berit Gehrke’s ongoing work.

10 Event sentences introduce discourse referents and they function with respect to DRSs in a way analogous to referential noun phrases. Events necessarily involve a change of state which is either situated in a culmination or an inception. A process sentence is capable of introducing a referent, but not one which is individuated and as a result of that the referents of process-type predicates cannot be counted. In Bach (1986), process-type predicates are predicates of quantities of ‘event-stuff’. In this respect, process-type predicates resemble mass terms. In turn, state sentences contain state predicates which are predicates of times. States add information to a discourse referent which has already been introduced into the discourse in the fashion similar to adjectives which add information about the nominal discourse referent. (cf. Sandström 1993:87). States, processes and events can undergo aspectual shifts as predicted by De Swart’s (1998), who assumes in her theory of aspect that the predicate- argument structure of the sentence denotes an atomic eventuality description and language- specific aspectual operators (overt or contextual) are eventuality description modifiers which map an eventuality of a certain type onto an eventuality of some potentially different type. Following De Swart (1998), I will maintain the distinction between Aktionsart and grammatical aspect which will allow me to explain the meaning effects their combination gives rise to. Essentially, the model theoretic notions underlying Aktionsart and aspect can be captured by introducing states, processes and events as ontological entities into the model.

1.1.2 Applications of event-based semantics and its advantages over interval-based semantics

Event-based semantics has many applications. It turned out to be indispensable in the study of focus-sensitivity (cf. Rooth (1985, Partee 1995, Herburger 2000, Beaver 2003 among others), adverbial quantification and in particular quantificational variability of indefinites in adverbially quantified contexts. De Swart (1993) claims that ‘quantification over situations is allowed if one of the arguments is variable, thus creating a set of situations for the quantifying adverb (henceforth Q-adverb) to operate on’, as presented in (11):

(11) a. *When Fido has blue eyes, it is intelligent. b. When a dog has blue eyes, it is intelligent.

In accordance with De Swart’s Plurality Condition on Quantification, individual-level predicates in sentence (11) pressupose uniqueness of the e-argument and consequently they

11 cannot be quantified over, unless there is an indefinite in the sentence which can be indirectly bound by the adverb of quantification, by means of quantification over assignments (De Swart 1993:118). This solution is only available if we assume that every predicate in a sentence carries a Davidsonian e-argument and as a consequence every different assignment of the indefinite corresponds to a different event. This observation is embedded within a larger discussion in De Swart (1993), in which she suggestively argues that generalized quantifiers selectively quantify over events. De Swart (1993) adopts two arguments in favor of the choice of events as the objects of quantification, rather than locations/intervals. First, it is possible to quantify over events that are different, though simultaneous, as illustrated in (12):

(12) a. Miles was wounded twice (by a bullet) yesterday. (Lewis (1975, 1.1) b. Kto podróuje, yje dwa razy. ‘Who travels, lives twice.’

Interval-based semantics would need to adopt the existence of two distinct intervals at which Miles would be wounded or during which he could live twice in order to analyze this sentence. Assuming that the two wounds may be simultaneously inflicted and that (12b) clearly refers to the situation of living two lives simultaneously, it seems reasonable to take events rather than intervals as objects of quantification. The second argument in favor of event-based semantics, or rather against the interval-based approach to adverbial quantification, is related to the possibility of quantification over static predicates in contexts like the one in (13):

(13) Last year Anna was in New York exactly three times.

De Swart (1993) observes that if in context (13) there are exactly three intervals in the period of last year for which the sentence ‘Anna was in New York’ is defined as true it is inconsistent with the treatment of states in the interval-based semantics of (Benett and Partee 1978) according to which a state holding at a certain interval obtains at any subinterval of that interval. Then, if there was at least one period in which Anna was in New York last year, there was in practice an infinite number of intervals at which this state held as well. Hence, it is impossible to capture the state under the definite quantity ‘exactly three times’. The same observation applies to processes, which like states, hold at an interval and all its subintervals.

12 An additional argument for treating events as entities quantified over by QAs comes from adverbially quantified complex temporal sentences like Always when Teddy took something from my piggybank, he left his chocolate fingerprints on it. In these contexts the set of eventualities denoted by a when-clause restricts the QA and the set of eventualities in the main clause contributes to the nuclear scope. Since temporal adjunct clauses in these contexts do not give the time reference directly on the time axis but rather presuppose their event (Heinämäki 1978), we cannot claim that QAs quantify over intervals, since they are not specified in the restrictive temporal adjunct clauses. Event-based semantics facilitated the discussion of adverbial quantification. It was also implemented by discourse-based semantics whose core assumption is that it is not sufficient to give a static interpretation of sentences in terms of truth conditions.

1.2 Discourse Representation Theory (DRT)

It has been first explicitely formulated in Partee (1973) that not only nominal morphemes but also tense/aspect morphemes are among anaphoric elements in discourse. This idea became one of the fundamental facets of Discourse Representation Theory (henceforth DRT) developed by Kamp and Rohrer (1983), Kamp and Reyle (1993). DRT focuses on the meaning of discourses rather than on the meaning of individual sentences. DRT theorists are especially interested in the intersentential connections that are responsible for discourse cohesion. It treats interpretation as a dynamic process in which speakers and receivers of a message share semantic representations which consist of discourse referents (coming with each new referential expression), conditions on the referents in the universe and relations between discourse entities. All these elements are constantly updated as the discourse unfolds. The representations are evaluated truth-conditionally by means of mapping of the representations to the universe of discourse that is the mental model shared by speakers and receivers of certain messages. A given Discourse Representation Structure (DRS) is evaluated truth-conditionally by means of an embedding function which associates entities in a mental model (universe of discourse) with discourse referents in the evaluated DRS such that every condition in the DRS is verified in the mental model. DRT has contributed insights into the process of interpretation of temporal relations holding between subsequent clauses in narrative/temporal discourse by specifying the role of aspectual information coming from subsequent discourse constituents. In DRT every tensed sentence is interpreted with respect to a previously established reference time, which functions as an antecedent. Reference time is a

13 discourse variable which constitutes the point of reference from which the eventuality is viewed. The issue at stake is which eventuality is evaluated with respect to the current reference time in discourse. Kamp and Reyle (1993) take a reference time introduced by a past tensed event clause as the one the next tensed discourse constituent is interpreted against. In other words, the tensed verb of the subsequent discourse constituent is anaphoric to the reference time of the previous clause. Event clauses introduce events into the DRS and update the current reference time, and therefore give rise to sequential relation, as presented in (14) while state and process clauses do not introduce a new reference time but include it and therefore give rise to coincidence/overlap relation, as shown in (15).2

(14) My friend picked up my glove (e1), crossed the ice rink (e2) and gave it to me (e3) smiling. (15) Ann was really busy (s1) the whole day. She worked (p1) hard in her lab.

Discourse Representation Theory accounts for a large number of cases. However, there are examples which show that DRT rules are insufficient, since temporal discourse in English is interpreted on the basis of the interaction of the compositionally derived aspectual meaning of the whole sentence and information inferred on the basis of contingency (causal) relations holding between eventualities, as observed by Moens and Steedman (1987), narrative discourse is interpreted not only on the basis of temporal categories but also on the basis of contingency relations holding between sentences.

1.3 Contingency relations in the interpretation of temporal discourse

Hobbs (1978), Moens and Steedman (1987), Caenepeel (1989), Lascarides and Asher (1993, 2003) discuss discourse examples which illustrate that past events do not necessarily create temporal progression, while states and processes do not necessarily block the progression in time. This is illustrated by the contrast between two small discourses in (16):

(16) a. When his little son slept, John left to work. b. When his little son slept, John was reading a book.

2 It is important to remember that the aspectual type, whether it is an event, a state or a process, arises from interactions between verbs, their arguments, certain adverbials (e.g. for/in adverbials) and even the surrounding discourse which can all give rise to aspectual shifts specific to a particular language

Both (16a and b) include a VP sleep which lexically represents a process. In the process of interpretation, the process of sleeping gets reinterpreted into an event of falling asleep in (16a) as determined by rhetorical information coming from the surrounding discourse. Similar observations inclined Moens and Steedman, Lascarides and Asher among others to conclude that interpretation of temporal discourse is not directly related to linear dimensional conception of time but rather to causal/contingency reasoning which means that narrative temporal progression has to do not only with restrictions of temporal categories, such as tense, aspect and temporal adverbials, but that linguistic information is additionally supplied by rhetorical/causal inferences. This means that a more principled semantics of temporal discourse should be based on the assumption that ‘propositions refer to a mental representation of events which is structured in terms of contingency properties’. (Moens and Steedman 1987:3) refer to such contingency-based event structure as a nucleus which comprises a culmination, preparatory process and consequent state. Contingency should be understood not as strict causality, which inevitably links the events, but as treating one eventuality as the logical prerequisite of the subsequent eventuality. The string of eventualities as expressed in (17), (18) and (19) supports the assumption that narrative discourse is not structured on the basis of solely temporal primitives.

(17) When the sailor reached the shore (A), he lit a fire (B). (18) When the sailor lit a fire (B), people from the indigeneous tribe noticed (C) smoke floating above the trees. (19) When the sailor reached the shore (A), people from the indigeneous tribe noticed (C) smoke floating above the trees. 17 and 18 =/Ω19

It is wrong to infer that the indigeneous people noticed smoke when the sailor reached the shore which should be predicted if eventualities were structured in discourse only in purely temporal terms. If it was so, eventualities (A), (B) and (C) should stand in a transitive relation, that is (A) > (B) > (C) should imply (A) > (C). This is not the case, as the sequences of (17) and (18) does not imply (19). An issue of how to distinguish formally what deserves to be called a cause and what deserves to be called a result cannot be captured by any necessary or sufficient conditions, since as stated by Hobbs (2001:27) ‘the bulk of our causal knowledge must be reasoned about defeasibly’. Irrespective of the defeasibility of causal reasoning, we

15 can conclude that in causal complexes A>B and B>C, eventuality A is a logical prerequisite for eventuality B while eventuality B is interpreted as a logical prerequisite for C. We additionally reason that C is not a logical consequence of A, hence an intransitive relation between eventualities A > B > C in examples (17), (18) and (19). The intransitivity between A, B and C would not be predicted if we structured the runtimes of eventualities A, B and C in purely temporal terms on the time axis. It should follow then that if the runtime of eventuality A is prior to the runtime of eventuality B and further if the runtime of eventuality B is prior to the runtime of eventuality C, the sequence of runtimes of eventualities A > C should also be licensed but in reality it results in a rhetorical clash. This strongly indicates that eventualities are not structured in discourse in strictly linear dimensional temporal terms but it is essential to take into consideration the rhetorical relations holding between them. The importance of rhetorical reasoning in the process of expression and interpretation of narrative discourse is captured in the following passage:

‘Temporal relations must be calculated on the basis of semantic content, knowledge of causation and knowledge of language use, as well as sentential syntax and compositional semantics. In the process of discourse interpretation we do not only calculate the temporal structure of the events described in a text but we also reason about the interaction of discourse structure and temporal structure.’ Lascarides and Asher (1993:438)

1.4 Pragmatic Discourse Relations (Lascarides and Asher 1993, 2003)

Lascarides and Asher (1993, 2003) propose that the hierarchical structure of discourse is modeled on the basis of discourse relations (also known as rhetorical relations) such as Narration, Elaboration, Background, Result and Explanation among others.

NARRATION (1,2): This is a relation which follows from Grice’s Maxim of Manner: Be Orderly. When two simple sentences are related by Narration, they depict two successive eventualities. The relation of Narration between two discourse constituents 1 and 2 implies the overlap of the consequent state of the first eventuality and the preparatory phase of the following eventuality, as illustrated in (20).

(20) Max stood up. John greeted him.

In example (20) the event of greeting is interpreted as following the event of standing up. The order of events in the text corresponds to the order in which they are interpreted.

RESULT (1,2): A Result relation between two sentences indicates that the situation in the first constituent logically results in the situation in the second sentence, as exemplified in (21). (21) Max switched on the light. The room was bright.

In examples (21) the event of turning on the light results in an inceptive state of the room’s being bright. In these examples causal context acts as an operator imposing a viewpoint on the state, resulting in an interval with two contrasting phases, non-state and state. The first eventuality brings about a transition from non-state into state.

EXPLANATION (1,2): The relation of Explanation is the Result’s inverse. This time, in the sequence of two discourse constituents, the textually subsequent situation explains why the situation in the first textual constituent happened, thus yielding the temporal inverse ordering.

(22) Max fell. John pushed him. (23) Jane left me. She fell in love with somebody else. (24) I left the party early. My babysitter phoned up in a bit of panic. (25) John died. Bill poisoned him.

In all instances in (22) to (25) the eventuality in the second discourse clause is interpreted as preceding the event in the first constituent. For instance the fact that John pushed Max explains why Max fell. These examples demonstrate clearly the plausibility of pragmatic inferencing in the interpretative process. I postpone the analysis of related phenomena in Polish to chapter 2, where I show that perfective is a morphologically and semantically marked category in Slavic and as such it considerably restrains or even blocks pragmatic inferences in some (but not in all) contexts.

ELABORATION (1,2): In the Elaboration relation, the second event is placed in the preparatory phase of the first eventuality, as presented in (26):

(26) When they built the Oxford Street bridge, the best local architect drew up the plans.

Moens and Steedman (1987) observe that in English, the drawing up of the plans is situated in the preparatory phase of building, which is enhanced by pragmatic inferencing about possible relation holding between these events. This discourse relation reveals interesting contrasts in the semantics of aspectual viewpoints in Slavic. The past simple verbal form in (26) can be translated into Polish by means of either perfective or imperfective aspect. Only the application of imperfective aspect in the when-clause leaves the information about the temporal relation between eventualities undespecified. This underspecification can be resolved by rhetorical reasoning. The semantic/pragmatic characteristics of imperfective and perfective aspects in Elaboration context, will become clear in my discussion of relevant Slavic facts presented in chapter 2.

BACKGROUND (1,2): This relation holds usually between two consecutive constituents, the first an event and the second a state or process. The fact that subsequent state is not causally related to the preceding event results in interpretation of partial overlap of two eventualities, as shown in (21).

(27) Max opened the door. The room was pitch dark.

In (27) the reader draws the logical conclusion that it was dark before Max opened the door or before Langdon strained his sight to distinguish any shapes. In Polish, Czech and Russian, the causally induced inception of processes or states is morphologically expressed by means of a verbal prefix in episodic contexts. However, in quantified contexts frequentative meaning is obligatorily expressed by means of imperfective aspect in Polish and Russian. This leaves the inceptive meaning underspecified. In the process of interpretation, this underspecification is solved pragmatically, which will be discussed in chapter 2.

1.5 An overview of the thesis

The relevance of rhetorical structure in the process of interpretation of narrative discourse has been proposed for English. An interesting question to ask is how in languages with a rich

18 morphological aspectual system, like Polish, Czech and Russian, rhetorical relations interact with language-specific semantics of aspectual operators in the process of interpretation of temporal discourse. This issue will be embedded in a broader discussion of the semantics of episodic complex temporal sentences with when-temporal adjunct clauses along the lines of Heinämäki (1978), Hinrichs (1986), De Swart (1999) in Chapter 2. In Chapter 3, I intend to contribute to the discussion of the semantics of adverbially quantified complex temporal sentences. More precisely I will account for the variation in the distribution of aspect in these contexts in Polish, Czech and Russian in OT syntax/semantics terms. In Chapter 4, my discussion of the semantics of adverbially quantified complex temporal sentences in Slavic will be extended to their bare habitual counterparts. A number of interesting questions will be at stake, like for instance: Why is the distribution of aspect different in the overtly quantified complex temporal sentences and in their bare habitual equivalents? What brings about the quantificational interpretation of bare habitual contexts: imperfective aspect or a non-episodic (HAB) operator? What is the role of aspect and modality in recoverability of the tacit HAB operator? What is the semantics of the HAB operator?

19 Chapter 2

The semantics of perfective/imperfective aspect and its interaction with rhetorical relations in episodic complex temporal sentences with when-temporal adjunct clauses in Polish, Czech and Russian as compared to English

In this chapter, I focus on the semantics of complex temporal sentences with when-temporal adjunct clauses whose interpretation is dependent on several factors like the positioning of when-clauses, the aspectual operators and the extent to which their semantics allows them to interact with rhetorical relations in establishing the ordering of eventualities expressed in both clauses. I base my analysis on Polish, Czech and Russian which very often show variation in the use of perfective and imperfective aspect. So far aspectual discussion in Slavic focused primarily on static contexts. I would like to take a slightly different perspective and look at these two aspectual operators in Slavic in dynamic contexts, or more precisely in the contexts of complex when-temporal sentences. I start this chapter from a brief overview of Heinämäki’s (1978) treatment of when-temporal sentences. She embedded her discussion in interval-based semantics, but her analysis provided insights for further event-based investigations proposed by Hinrichs (1986), de Swart (1999) and de Hoop and de Swart (2000). These three discussions will constitute a theoretical basis for my subsequent discussion of the semantics of perfective and imperfective aspects in Slavic and their interaction with rhetorical relations.

2.1 Connective –when and aspect 2.1.1 Heinämäki (1978)

Heinämäki observes that unlike other temporal adverbials like for instance in May, on Friday afternoon, at 5 o’clock, their clausal counterparts provide temporal specification about the state of affairs described in the main clause indirectly, that is they do not refer to some specific regions on the time axis. They narrow down the temporal location of the main clause eventuality in relation to some other state of affairs expressed in the when-clause. Heinämäki treats temporal connectives as logical predicates which take sentences as their arguments. She builds her generalizations on the following facts:

20 (1) It was raining in Utrecht when I was there. (2) The balloon burst when my cat was playing with it. (3) They built the wall when bricks were still very cheap. (4) We were crossing the street, when Mary noticed us. (5) Everybody was away, when Mary destroyed the documents. (6) When John wrecked the car, Bill fixed it. (7) When Viorica added bicarbonate of soda to her solution, it exploded.

Clearly, the interpretation of these contexts depends on the aspectual configurations. In examples (1-3), when-clauses contain durative eventualities. The when-clause in (4) have an achievement, while (5) and (6) represent accomplishments. Of the main clauses (1), (4) and (5) are durative, (2) contains an achievement and (3) and (6) represent accomplishments. In (7) both clauses represent achievements (non-durative). The general pattern is that irrespective of their distribution in when- or main-clauses, the runtimes (intervals) at which achievement, accomplishment clauses hold are included in the ones at which durative eventualities hold. When each of the clauses is non-durative, the clauses cannot be interpreted as cotemporal. Events that happen in both clauses happen in succession, like in (7). Heinämäki proposes the following truth conditions for sentences of the type A when B: (8) A when B is true iff

(i) A is true at an interval J, (ii) B is true at an interval K, and (iii) a. If A or B (or both) is true, then there is an interval I such that I ⊆ J and I ⊆ K. If A is an accomplishment, then I = J; If B is an accomplishment, then I = K. b. if neither A nor B is durative, than F(K) < I(J), where F stands for the final point of the interval K and I stands for the initial point of the interval J.

2.1.2 Hinrichs (1986)

Hinrichs’ (1986) analysis is based on Heinämäki (1978), but his study of temporal relations in narrative discourse is embedded in an event-based theory, which means that he treats events as discourse referents. He adopts a Vendlerian (1957) ontology of basic eventuality types ie. states, activities, accomplishments, achievements. Hinrichs treats past tense sentences as anaphoric, since their interpretation always depends on the previous

21 discourse setting. An eventuality in each finite sentence is anaphorically related to the previously introduced reference time. The process of creating anaphoric relations between subsequent sentences is dynamic, since the reference time is constantly updated and it moves on in time. The movement of the reference time is related to the aspectual type of a given sentence. An event occurs within the current reference time introduced by the previous context and it shifts the value of the current reference time to a new one which is located ‘just after’ that event. By contrast, states do not shift the reference time but they typically give background information. Hinrichs makes a specific statement about the role of all temporal modifiers (temporal adverbs or temporal conjunctions) in interpretation of a narrative discourse. He claims that all sentences, whether they are complex tensed sentences containing temporal modifiers or simple tensed sentences without such modifications, are entered into the set of sentences Si of discourse D as carrying a natural number index n. The method of indexing is carried out in such a way that any sentence in a discourse receives a higher index than any preceding sentence and a lower index than any following sentence. It is necessary that in complex tensed sentences the temporal modifiers always introduce a higher index than the clause they modify. In what follows, according to Hinrichs when-temporal adjunct clauses, are always processed prior to the main clause, regardless of their position in a complex sentence. Hinrichs agrees with Heinämäki that if at least one of the clauses – the when-clause or the main clause – describes a durative event, that event will temporally overlap the event described in the other clause. However, he claims that two accomplishments or achievements related by when do not necessarily give rise to a sequential interpretation. He bases this claim on the following observation:

(9) John broke his arm when he wrecked the Pinto. (10) When the Smiths threw a party, they invited all their old friends.

Eventualities in (9) are interpreted as simultaneous, while in (10) the main clause eventuality are interpreted as taking place in the preparatory stage of the when-clause eventuality. Hinrichs claims that a time adverbial introduces its own reference point, so it overrides the current reference time produced by the discourse so far. Therefore, unlike in simple sentences, the when-clause accomplishments and achievements do not introduce a new reference time into the discourse, but are mapped onto the reference point introduced by when.

22 2.1.3 De Swart (1999)

De Swart (1999) claims that Hinrichs’ indexing mechanism in which temporal clauses receive an index that is higher than the index of the sentence they modify is unproblematic only for pre-posed temporal clauses and temporal adverbials. De Swart observes that such analysis does not capture the differences in meaning between preposed and postposed time adverbials.

(11) At six o’clock, Jane left. (12) Jane left at six o’clock.

The context in (11) answers the question What happened at six o’clock?, while the one in (12) answers the question When did Jane leave? If the ‘old’ information is provided by the main clause and the ‘new’ information by the time adverbial, (12) provides a more precise location in time for Jane’s leaving. The main clause in (12) is anaphoric in nature, hence it is related for its location in time to the previous discourse, rather than to the time adverbial. The postponed time adverbial in (12) only further specifies the location time of the main clause event. These meaning effects play an even more prominent role in negative sentences.

(13) At three o’clock, the bomb didn’t explode. (14) The bomb didn’t explode at three o’clock.

In (13) the only interpretation is the one in which the time adverbial is outside the scope of negation, as represented in (15):

(15) ∃t [three o’clock(t) ∧ ¬∃e [explode(the bomb, e) ∧ t o Τ(e)]] What happened at 3 o’clock was that the bomb didn’t explode, (although it was preprogrammed to do so)

(14) can have the same interpretation, but the time adverbial may also be interpreted under the scope of negation, as represented in (16):

(16) ∃e [explode(the bomb, e) ∧ ¬∃t [ three o’clock (t) ∧ Τ(e) o t]] The bomb exploded but it did not happen at 3 o’clock.

In this reading, the time adverbial does not provide the reference time for the main clause which is not predicted by Hinrichs’s rules.

Negation bears on the main clause in (13) and on the time adverbial in the relevant reading of (14). It is because the part of the sentence that is not in focus constitutes the background. This is old information which is presupposed to be true and hence it is outside the pragmatic scope of negation. (cf. Horn 1989: 504-528). The effect of position of adverbial clauses is equally strong in the following examples with clausal time adverbials with negation:

(17) When Bill left the house, he didn’t turn off the stove. (18) Bill didn’t turn off the stove when he left the house.

In (17) the pre-posed temporal clause provides the reference time for the main clause and takes wide scope over negation. The sentence in (18) is ambiguous. Apart from the reading analogous to this of (17), it allows readings in which Bill did turn off the stove but not when he left the house. In this readnig, the subordinate clause is under the scope of the negation and it does not provide the reference time for the main clause. De Swart proposes the following explanation of these facts. As stated in Emonds (1985), postponed temporal adverbials or temporal clauses are PPs, which modify the VP, so the sentence-final position is their basic position. Pre-posing of a temporal phrase has the semantic effect of topicalization. The topic is “what the sentence is about”, as formulated by Reinhart (1982). The topicalized time adverbials provide the temporal frame for the main clause, or in other words they provide reference time. When the temporal adverbial is not topicalized, what is old and what is new information is not determined syntactically. What helps to determine this division is Focus. This is also the reason why the meaning effects are stronger with negation, which is sensitive to focus and operates on what constitutes the background to the focused element. It naturally follows that the topicalized time adverbial, provides old information and it ends up outside rather than inside the pragmatic scope of negation. De Swart additionally points to the contexts in which the absence or presence of a causal rhetorical relation between eventualities may gives rise two different interpretations only if the temporal when-adjunct is post-posed, which is visible in the following contrast between (19) and (20):

24 (19) When the president asked who would support her, Robert raised his hand. (20) Robert raised his hand when the president asked who would support her.

De Swart (1999) concludes that neither preposed nor postposed when-clauses express a succession of events in which the event described by the when-clause follows the main clause event, even if this is favored by world knowledge. This is captured by the constraint TA and which requires that temporal adjuncts do not function as α in a rhetorical relation R (α,β) as formulated by de Hoop and de Swart (2000). The pre-posed temporal clause in (19) allows for only one reading: the main clause event is located shortly after the event described by the adjunct clause. There is a strong causal relation between the two clauses: Robert’s raising of his hand is naturally interpreted as a response to the president’s request for support. As argued in de Swart (1999), pre-posed temporal clauses are topicalized and always provide the rhetorical antecedent for the main clause. By contrast a postposed when-clause can be either topic or focus. Thus, in (20) a post-posed when-clause either provides the rhetorical antecedent of the main clause or establishes a relation of temporal overlap in the absence of a rhetorical relation. In other words, (20) can get the same reading as (19) if the when-clause is a topic (and consequently the causal reasing suggest that the when-clause functions as α in a rhetorical relation R(α,β)). However, when the when-clause functions as a focus, that is when the main clause enriched the discourse beforehand, no rhetorical relation can be established between eventualities and the resulting interpretation is the one according to which the president’s asking a question and Jill’s raising her hand happened simultaneously by coincidence. This observation is relevant for Polish as well, which is particularly visible in the following contexts:

(21) Wczoraj Jan zaptytał nas, czy go odwiedzimy wieczorem. ‘Yesterday, John asked if we want to visit him in the evening.’ a. Ja powiedziałem nie, kiedy Marysia powiedziała tak. ‘I said no when Mary said yes.’ b. Kiedy Marysia powiedziała tak, ja powiedziałem nie. ‘When Mary said yes, I said no.’

25 (22) Umówiłymy si z Zosi, e w przyszłym tygodniu albo ja j odwiedz albo ona mnie. ‘We made an arrangement with Zosia that I will visit her or she will visit me next week.’ a. Zaszło nieporozumienie i ja j odwiedziłam, kiedy ona mnie odwiedziła. ‘There arose a misunderstanding and I visited her, when she visited me.’ b. W praktyce spotkałymy si 2 razy, kiedy ona mnie odwiedziła, ja j odwiedziłam. ‘In practice we met twice, when she visited me, I visited her.’

In (21b) and (22b), the only interpretation is the one in which two eventualities happen in succession, since the topicalized when-clause provides old information and it introduces the reference time for the main clause. In turn, in (21a) and (22a) lead to ambiguities. Under one reading, (21a) and (22a) are interpreted in the same way as (21b) and (22b). But there is an alternative reading available in which Mary said yes at the moment at which I said no or my friend visited me at the moment in which I visited her. Under this reading there is no causal relation between eventualities, there is just a relation of temporal overlap. These three subsequent discussions, namely Heinämäki (1978), Hinrichs (1986) and de Swart (1999), will constitute a theoretical background for my study of how the semantics of the when-connective interacts with the semantics of perfective and imperfective grammatical aspects in Polish, Czech and Russian and how, in turn, these aspectual operators interact with different rhetorical relations in the context of complex temporal sentences related by the connective when. It is necessary however, to arrive at a relative agreement about the semantics of perfective and imperfective aspects in Slavic, which will be the first step in my subsequent discussion.

2.2 De Swart’s (1998) theory of aspect

In De Swart’s (1998) model, the predicate-argument structure of the sentence denotes an atomic eventuality description corresponding to Partee’s (1984) and Bach’s (1986) ontology of events, processes and states3. The basic aspectual type may undergo shifts when

De Swart (1998), keeps the distinction between Aktionsart and grammatical aspect in order to be able to explain the meaning effects their combination gives rise to. Essentially, the model theoretic notions underlying Aktionsart and aspect can be captured by introducing states, processes and events as ontological entities into the model.

26 acted upon by aspectual operators (overt or contextual) which are eventuality description modifiers which map sets of eventualities of a certain type onto sets of eventualities of some other type. In English, the Progressive operator imposes restrictions on its input and it only operates on events and processes turning them into states (for motivation see De Swart 1998), as demonstrated in (23):

(23) a. John was working/sleeping/pulling a handle. (process state) b. John was reaching the top/wining/building a house. (event state)

The Simple Past is not treated as an aspectual operator but rather as a tense operator which places events prior to now. Therefore, past tense sentences allow the underlying eventuality description to shine through, as presented in (24).

(24) a. John built a house/found a coin. (event) b. John worked/swam in the lake/slept. (process) c. John was sad/knew English/believed in God. (state)

This underlying eventuality description may be further shifted by other aspectual operators or it may undergo coercion which is a contextually determined process of reinterpretation, as shown in (25)

(25) a. When John built a house, he used the best materials. b. When my little son slept, I left for a second to do some shopping. c. When Mary learned that she was fired, she was angry.

In (25a) the basic eventuality type of built a house which is lexically an event gets contextually reinterpreted (coerced) into a process. In (25b) my little son slept, which is lexically a process, gets coerced into a quantized event. In (25c) the state was angry is contextually shifted into an event since we focus on the inception and was angry is interpreted as got angry.

27 2.2.1 Aspectual operators in Polish, Czech and Russian

In my discussion of perfective and imperfective aspects in Polish, Czech and Russian I will treat them as eventuality description modifiers which operate on basic eventuality descriptions and impose on them certain semantic restrictions, which will be discussed in this section. In Polish, Czech and Russian, perfective aspect is expressed in a majority of cases4 by attachment of a perfectivizing prefix to a lexical root as shown in (26a). In turn, imperfective is expressed by unprefixed verbal form (basic imperfective) or imperfectivising suffix -ywa- (derived imperfective) as demonstrated in (26b and c) respectively:

(26) a. Maria z-budowa-ła dom. (perfective) – prefixed verbal stem Mary perf-build-past house. ‘Mary built a house.’ b. Maria budowa-ła dom. (basic imperfective) – unprefixed stem Mary build-past house. ‘Mary was building a house. ‘ c. Maria do-budow-ywa-ła dach. (derived imperfective) – suffix ywa Mary perf-build-imp-past roof. ‘Mary was building (an additional)5 part of the roof.

An interesting characteristic of the perfective aspect in Slavic is that it can be used to express eventive meanings which denote a transition (change of state) which may be either situated in the inception of a process or a state or in the culmination of a process or a state (cf. Rozwadowska 2003), as illustrated in (27) and (28) respectively:

(27) a. POL Kiedy Filip uderzyłP Ann, roz-płakałaP si. b. RUS Kogda Filip udarilP Annu, ona za-plakalaP c. CZC Když Filip uhodilP Annu, roz-plakalaP se. When Filip perf-hit-past Ann, she inc.perf-cry-past. ‘When Filip hit Ann, she started crying.’

4 There are very few examples of unprefixed perfective forms like kupiş ‘buy’, dostaş ‘get’ in Polish. 5 The lexical content of the perfective prefix.

28 (28) a. POL Kiedy usnłP, mama poszłaP na zakupy. b. RUS Kogda on zasnul, ego mama poshla v magazin. c. CZC Když usnul, jeho matka odešla nakupovat. When he inc.perf-sleep-past, his mother perf-go-past shopping. ‘When he fell asleep, his mother went out shopping.’

On the other hand, an interesting feature of the imperfective aspect in Slavic is that it can be used to denote unbounded episodic and frequentative/iterative eventualities. When the imperfective is used in episodic contexts, it invariably denotes states or processes (homogeneous eventuality descriptions) which according to DRT rules do not individuate a new reference time in temporal discourse and therefore they do not create progression on the time axis. The resulting interpretation is that of coincidence with the subsequent eventuality in 6 discourse , hence in example (29), the semantics of the imperfective is incompatible with the semantics of the adverb potem ‘afterwards’.

I P (29) a. (POL) #Widziałam, e wczoraj kiedy PRZEGR-YWA-Ł , WYSZEDŁ potem z pokoju . I observed that yesterday when he lose-imp-past, he leave-perf-past the room afterwards. ‘I observed that yesterday when he was losing, he left the room afterwards.’ I I b. (RUS) #Vchiera kogda on PROIGRYVAL , on RASSTRAILSYA potom ot svoei neudachi. Yesterday when he lose-imp-past, he (break down)-imp-past with his failure afterwards. ‘Yesterday when he was losing, he was depressed with his failure afterwards.’

On the other hand, when the imperfective is used in quantified contexts in Polish in Russian, it sheds light on the frequentative character of the input eventuality description which can be further coerced depending on the discourse context, that is temporal adverbs and rhetorical relations (cf. Moens and Steedman 1987, Caenepeel 1989, Lascarides and Asher 1993, 2003). Consequently, in example (30), the Polish imperfective expresses the frequentative/distributive character of the input eventuality description whose temporal

6 In fact, states and processes reported in imperfective, when used in the second discourse constituent in the chain of eventualities, may get coerced into events depending on the discourse relation. This seems to be subject to variation between Polish and Czech on the one hand and Russian on the other and hence is subject to furher investigation.

29 relation with the eventuality in the subsequent discourse constituent is fully dependent on pragmatic and semantic influence of the surrounding discourse, which means that in (30) the semantics of adverb potem ‘afterwards’ determines the ultimate sequential interpretation.

I I (30) a. (POL) Zawsze kiedy PRZEGRYWAŁ , WYCHODZIŁ potem z pokoju. Always when he lose-imp-past, he leave-imp-past afterwards the room. ‘Always when he lost (lit. was losing), he left the room afterwards.’ I I b. (RUS) Vsegda kogda on PROIGRYVAL , on RASSTRAIVALSYA potom ot svoei neudachi. Always when he lose-imp-past, he (break down)-imp-past afterwards with his failure. ‘Always when he lost (lit. was losing), he was depressed with his failure afterwards.’

The question that arises is what is the nature of the perfective and imperfective operators in Polish, Czech and Russian. Perfective operator has a very consistent semantics. It takes any type of eventuality description as its input, whether it is a state, a process or an event, and yields invariably an event as its output, as presented in (31):

(31) a. Jan prze-spałP cał noc. (process → event) John perf-slept the whole night (through). b. Jan u-wierzyłP mi. (state → event) John perf-believed me. ‘John started to believe me.’ c. Jan z-budowałP zamek z piasku. (event → event) John perf-built a sand-castle. ‘John built up a sand-castle.’

While it is unproblematic to settle down the semantics for perfective operator, it is debatable what the uniform semantic treatment of imperfective aspect should look like. Imperfective behaves differently in episodic and in quantified contexts. Is there any property that this two uses of imperfective have in common? In the next section, I will discuss the proposal of Van Geenhoven (2005), who suggests that imperfective may be viewed as a plurality operator on

30 events or event times. It will remain clear, however that there are some differences between a plurality operator in the nominal domain and imperfective aspect and that the only property that unifies both uses of imperfective is unboundedness.

2.2.2 Imperfective: a plural operator or an unboundedness operator?

Van Geenhoven (2005) bases her analysis of aspect on empirical evidence from West Greenlandic Eskimo (WG), a polysynthetic language that has overt continuative, frequentative and gradual aspect markers on verbs. She presents a semantic analysis of aspect markers in WG in which she treats them as pluractional operators expressing plurality of events or event times. She embeds her semantic formalization in interval-based semantics. Let us consider the important facts, presented in (32) and (33):

(32) Nuka ullap tungaa tammat sanioqquttarpoq. Nuka ulla-p tunga-a tama-at saniuqqut-tar-puq N.abs morning-ERG direction-3sg.sg.abs all-3sg go.by-repeatedly-ind.[-tr].3sg ‘Nuka went by repeatedly the whole morning.’

(33) a. Unnuaq tamaat erinarsorpoq. Unnuaq tata-at irinarsur-puq Night.abs all-3sg sing-ind.[-tr].3sg ‘He sang all night long (with or without breaks).’

b. Unnuaq tamaat erinarsortuarpoq. Unnuaq tata-at irinarsur-tuar-puq Night.abs all-3sg sing-continuously-ind.[-tr].3sg ‘He sang all night long (without breaks, nonstop.’

In (32) the morpheme tar expresses explicitly the frequentative character of an eventuality. In (32a) it is underspecified whether the eventuality of singing happened with or without breaks. In turn, the morpheme -tuar- makes it specific that the eventuality of singing was continuous, without any breaks. Van Geenhoven claims that the affixal aspect frequentative marker –tar- in WG illustrated in (31) contributes a distributive operator that is referred to as a crystal star ≤ and she represents its meaning in (34):

(34) -tar- ‰ λVλtλx(≤t V(x) at t) where ≤t V(x) at t = 1 iff ∃t’(t’⊆t ∧ V(x) at t’ ∧ number(t’) > 1 ∧ ∀ t’ (t’ ⊆ t ∧ V(x) at t’ → ∃t’’ (t’’ ⊆ t ∧ (t’’>t’ ∨ t’’ < t’) ∧ V(x) at t’’ ∧ ∃t’’’ (t’

‘There was a time t that lasts the whole morning and for every time t’ that is part of t at which Nuka went by there was a time t’’ that is also a part of t at which he went by and t’’>t’ and there is a time’’’ between t’ and t’’ at which he did not go by.’

In turn, the continuative marker –tuar- presented in (33b) is a continuative operator is referred to as a star operator ◊, whose semantics is represented in (35):

(35) V-tuar ‰ λtλx(◊t V(x) at t) where ◊t V(x) at t = 1 iff ∃t’(t’⊆t ∧ V(x) at t’ ∧ number(t’) > 1 ∧ ∀ t’ (t’ ⊆ t ∧ V(x) at t’ → ∃t’’ (t’’ ⊆ t ∧ (t’’>t’ ∨ t’’ < t’) ∧ V(x) at t’’ ∧ ¬∃t’’’ (t’

∀x∀V∀t∀t’ (◊t V(x) at t ∧ ◊t’ V(x) at t’ ‰ ◊t⊕t’ V(x) at t⊕t’ irinarsur –tuar ‰ λtλx (◊t sing (x) at t)

‘There was a time t that lasts all night long and for every time t’ that is part of t at which he sang there was a time t’’ that is also a part of t at which he sang and t’’>t’ and it is not the case that there is a time t’’’ between t’ and t’’ at which he did not sing.’

Parallel to her treatment of the frequentative and continuative markers as pluractional operators on events or event times, Van Geenhoven suggests that the grammatical aspect ‘imperfective’ can be regarded as instances of unbounded pluractionality over events or event times, corresponding to English –s plural morpheme which indicates the presence of a plurality of individuals. Is it justified to treat imperfective as a plurality operator on events analogous in its semantics to the English plural morpheme ‘s’ in the nominal domain? In order to answer this question I will follow Link (1983) and Bach (1986) in their assumption that the domain of individuals (type e entities) and events is formed by singular as well as plural objects. Singular objects are atomic entities and have no proper parts, while plural

32 objects are mereological sums having proper parts. They claim that mass nouns, count nouns and plurals correspond to algebraic structures which are represented as join semi-lattices, exemplified in (36): (36) {a, b, c}

{a,b} {a,c} {b,c}

{a} {b} {c}

The set in a join semi-lattice in (35) is ordered by the part of-relation, which means that the members of the set are {a}, {b}, {c}, {a,b}, {a,c}, {b,c} and {a,b,c}. All the lines in the semi-lattice represent a ‘part-of’ relation, hence the following relations are at stake: a is part of {a,b} and {a,c}; b is part of {a,b} and {b,c}; c is part of {a,c} and {b,c} and {a,b}, {a,c} and {b,c} are each part of {a,b,c}. Due to the transitive character of ‘part-of’ relations, it also follows that a, b and c are part of {a,b,c} as well. Importantly, the difference between singular and plural count nouns is that within the domain of dentotation of count singulars like e.g. apple, there is a set of singularities that is {a}, {b}, {c} in the semi-lattice in (36). On the other hand, within the denotation of plurals like e.g. apples there is only the set of pluralities: {a,b}, {a,c}, {b,c}, {a,b,c} in a join semi-lattice in (36). Plurality operation is schematically represented in (36) following Chierchia (1998):

(37)

PL (applew) {a,b,c}

{a,b}, {b,c}, {a,c}

PL applew a, b, c

The plural morpheme ‘s’ restricts the domain of individuals to plural sets solely. The plural ‘s’ morpheme cannot be attached to mass nouns, which are argued by Chierchia (1998) to come from the lexicon as plural. Hence pluralizing them makes no sense. The general assumption is that mass nouns take their denotation from the domain which exists next to a count domain and is homomorphic to it. The domain from which mass nouns take their denotation is not required to be atomic. This is the reason why it is impossible to directly

33 count mass nouns (*three powder). As stated in Chierchia (1998:347) who follows Kratzer (1989), ‘in order to count, it is necessary to individuate a level at which to count and in natural language this has to be a set of atoms. But mass nouns, unlike count ones, do not correspond to a set of atoms. Hence, it does not provide a suitable counting criterion.’ In what follows mass nouns and plural count nouns take their denotations from distinct domains, plural count nouns have an atomic domain while mass nouns have a non-atomic one but their domains are semantically (algebraically) represented by the same part-whole structure. Pluralization by means of the plural morpheme ‘s’ in English applies only in an atomic domain (it does not operate in the non-atomic domain of mass nouns). Can we assume Van Geenhoven’s treatment of imperfective as a plurality operator on events, analogous to the English plural ‘s’? The answer is negative. Imperfective may denote episodic states or processes, which as argued by Bach (1986) have a mass-like denotation. Imperfective can also denote plural states, process and events in frequency, iterative or habitual contexts, which are semantically analogous to bare plural nouns. This means that unlike the plural ‘s’-morpheme, imperfective does not operate only in the atomic domain. Essentially, the two possible denotations of imperfective aspect share the property of cumulative and divisive reference. Cumulative and divisive reference is formally defined by Krifka (1989, 1992), as in (38) and (39) respectively:

(38) a. ∀P (CUM(P) ↔∀ x,y[P(x) & P(y) →P (x and y)]

‘A predicate has cumulative reference if and only if for every x and y that have the property P, the join of x and y has the property P.’

b. ∀P (DIV(P) ↔∀ x,y[P(x) & y ‘be part of’ x → P(y)

’A predicate P has a divisive reference iff every part of P also has a property P.’

In order to define UNBOUNDEDNESS more precisely, I assume an additional condition.

d. An eventuality e is UNBOUNDED: - if every part of e is a subpart of e’ where e’ is also a part of e - if every part of e has a subpart.

34 Imperfective verb like wygrywaş – ‘to win-imp’ may denote an ongoing process of winning or repeated eventualities of winning. In both uses, imperfective satisfies the conditions of cumulative and divisive reference. If any of the parts of an ongoing process of winning are combined, they also denote a process of winning. Additionally, for every part of an eventuality of winning there is an eventuality of winning’ of which winning is a subpart. Similarly, if any of the parts of a sequence of repeated winnings are put together, they also denote a sequence of repeated winnings (cumulative reference). On the other hand, any subpart of an episodic process of winning also denotes a process of winning and any subpart of the sequence of repeated winnings also denote a sequence of repeated winnings (divisive reference). Since imperfective in both its uses satisfies the requirement for cumulativity and divisiveness and it additionally satisifes condition given in (38c), I will refer to imperfective aspect as an unboundedness operator in the rest of this thesis. In contrast to imperfective, perfective invariably denotes events and as such it always has quantized reference, defined in Krifka (1992) as in (39):

(39) a. ∀P[QUAS(P) ↔ ∀x∀y[P(x) ∧ P(y) → ¬y⊂Sx]] ’A predicate P has a quantized reference iff no part of P also has a property P.’

In some exceptional uses an eventuality denoted by a perfective should satisfy the condition which is the inverse of (38c), hence I assume a broader understanding of quantizedness:

b. Perfective denotes a quantized eventuality e if: - it is not the case that for every part of e there exists an e’ of which e is a subpart. - it is not the case that every part of eventuality e has a subpart.7

Perfective is an overt quantizedness operator8. It acts like a classifier in the nominal domain. Classifiers in the nominal domain map mass denotations onto sets of atoms. Perfective aspect

7 Condition (39b) captures such exceptional perfectives as przedłuyş ‘lengthen’, poszerzyş ‘broaden’. These perfectives satisfy the conditions of cumulativity and divisibility, but they do not satisfy the condition given in (39b), since if we lengthen (e) sth to some set length, it is not the case that there must exist an eventuality (e’) of which (e) is a subpart. Additionally there is a culmination part of perfective ‘lengthen’ which has no further subparts, since it refers to a singleton set containing a quantized event which individuates the reference time. 8 In my discussion of perfective aspect I abstract away from pofectives which to my mind also act like classifiers in that they take mass denotations and shift them into sets of atoms which are bounded and thus individuated, but they also satisfy the conditions of cumulative and divisive reference. When I say perfective in this thesis, I do not mean pofectives. They require a separate discussion.

35 restricts the denotation of a verb it operates on to a singleton set containing a quantized event. This explains why perfective is preferably interpreted as episodic. Its quantized reference results in the individuation of a reference time. (in this respect perfective is similar to count singulars which in most cases individuate a singular atom by default as argued by Farkas (2006)). My treatment of perfective aspect as a quantizedness operator and imperfective aspect as an unboundedness operator is compatible with another observation, namely that imperfective aspect in episodic and quantified/habitual sentences is compatible with until- clauses which operate only on divisive/cumulative main clauses, as illustrated by the contrast in (40):

(40) a. #Mozart napisałP Requiem dopóki nie umarł. Mozart perf-wrote (up) the Requiem until he died. b. SprztałI w pokoju dopóki nie zadzwonił Piotr. He clean-imp in his room until not called Peter. ‘He was cleaning in his room until Peter called him.’ c. Jan czsto odwiedzałI muzeum Van Gogha w Amsterdamie dopóki nie odkrył, e lepsza kolekcja dzieł Van Gogha znajduje si w Kröller Müller. ‘John often visited-imp Van Gogh’s museum in Amsterdam until he found out that there is a better collection of Van Gogh’s paintings in Kröller Müller.

In (40a) the perfective aspect in the main clause denotes a quantized event and hence it gives rise to unacceptability, because the until-clause allows only cumulative/divisive main clause eventualities. This requirement is satisified in (40b) in which imperfective denotes an unbounded episodic process (or state) and (40c) in which the imperfective is used to denote an unbounded complex state (plural events/states or processes). With these assumptions about the semantics of perfective/imperfective contrast in Polish, Czech and Russian, I would like to investigate how they interact with rhetorical relations in dynamic contexts. I will mainly focus my attention on the distribution of perfective and imperfective aspect in Slavic complex sentences with when-temporal adjunct clauses in different rhetorical environments.

36 2.3 Specificity of perfective and imperfective aspects in dynamic contexts

Lascarides and Asher (1993, 2003) claim that both linguistic information and discourse information participate in the process of temporal discourse interpretation. However, they base their analysis on English small discourses, where the simple past does not contribute to aspectual interpretation. In theory, all aspectual relations are thus underspecified since they are not lexically expressed. Applications of their theory to e.g. French (as in the Handbook of French Semantics 2004 by Corblin and de Swart at al.) already indicate that morphologically realized aspectual information constrains the interpretation. However, where underspecification remains, rhetorical relations facilitate the interpretation. My aim is to explore how perfective and imperfective aspect interact with rhetorical relations in different contexts discussed by Lascarides and Asher (1993, 2003). A dynamic perspective with a special focus on different rhetorical environments can give us new insights into the semantics (semantic specificity) of perfective and imperfective aspectual operators in Slavic.

2.3.1 The interaction of perfective and imperfective aspect with the Elaboration rhetorical relation

In this section I intend to investigate how perfective/imperfective aspect in Polish behave when embedded in the rhetorical relation called by Lascarides and Asher (1993, 2003) Elaboration. Let me first present how Elaboration rhetorical contexts have been treated for English temporal simple past sentences in Hinrichs (1986), Moens and Steedman (1987) and Lascarides and Asher (1993, 2003). As mentioned in the first chapter, in the Elaboration relation, the second event is placed in the preparatory phase of the first eventuality, as in (41) (repreated here for convenience):

(41) When they built the Oxford Street bridge, the best local architect drew up the plans.

The discussion of Lascarides and Asher (1993) is an extension of Hinrichs’ (1986) and Moens and Steedman’s (1987) discussion of the semantics of when-temporal adjunct clauses and their interaction with aspect in English. As discussed in section 2.1.2 Hinrichs refutes Heinämäki’s (1978) claim that two accomplishments or achievements related by when give rise to a sequential interpretation. He bases his argumentation on the contexts which are

37 referred to as Elaboration relation in the later theory of Lascarides and Asher, as exemplified in (42): (42) When the Smiths threw a party, they invited all their old friends.

The main clause eventuality in (42) is interpreted as taking place in the preparatory phase of the when-clause event. Hinrich makes a generalization that a time adverbial introduces its own reference point, so it overrides the current reference time produced by the discourse and the when-clause accomplishments and achievements do not introduce a new reference time into the discourse, but are mapped onto the reference point introduced by when. Related conclusions can be found in the work of Moens and Steedman (1987) who focus on the contexts given in (43):

(43) When they builtP the 39th Street bridge... a. ... a local architect drew up the plans b. ... they used the best materials c. ... most of the traffic problems disappeared

In the sentences presented in (43) it is pragmatics which determines the interpretation of eventualities in discourse. Moens and Steedman (1987), in a similar spirit as Hinrichs, analyze when-clauses as introducing a novel temporal referent whose identifiability is presupposed. The focused temporal referent is an eventuality in the when-clause which constitutes the entire nucleus, and the event in the main clause can attach itself anywhere in the structure where world knowledge allows. Moens and Steedman propose the structure presented in (44) for the event of building the bridge.

Preparatory state Consequent state (44) they prepare to build they have built the bridge

they build the bridge

In the sentence given in (43a) the event of drawing up of the plans would be most naturally situated in the preparatory phase of building the bridge, in (43b) the eventuality of using the best materials is located within the asserted time of building and in (43c) traffic problems disappeared as a consequence of building the bridge. All three interpretations are driven by pragmatic inferencing. What Hinrichs, Moens and Steedman and Lascarides and Asher

38 remain silent about is the fact that the when-clause eventualities in the English contexts they discuss are used in simple past, which is not an aspectual operator, hence the eventuality description is not morphologically expressed. This lexical underspecification is the main reason for the susceptibility of these contexts to pragmatic influence. Even in English, when the same when-clause eventualities, as in (43) are operated upon by Progressive operator, which turns them into states, the only accessible interpretation is that of coincidence between the subsequent eventuality in the main clause, as presented in (45):

(45) When they were buildingI the 39th Street bridge...

a. #... a local architect drew up the plans b.... they used the best materials c. ... most of the traffic problems disappeared

The interpretation of all three discourses is determined by the aspectual progressive operator, which shows no sensitivity to pragmatic inferences. As a consequence, all eventualities in (45a), (b) and (c) are interpreted as taking place in the course of the event of building the bridge, which makes the sentence (45a) pragmatically infelicitous. The relevant question to be asked is how perfective and imperfective aspectual operators in Slavic constrain the interpretation of the discussed contexts. As stated in section 2.2.2, the semantics of perfective aspect is very specific. Perfective restricts the denotation of a verb it operates on to a singleton set containging a quantized event. Its quantized reference results in individuation of a reference time. Hence, it is expected that perfective will update the reference time introduced by a when-clause and consequently it will block or restrain considerably the rhetorical impact of the Elaboration discourse relation in Polish, Czech and Russian. In (46), I provide only Polish examples, since there is no variation between Polish, Czech and Russian at this point.

(46) Kiedy zbudowaliP most na ulicy Grunwaldzkiej... a. #lokalny architekt narysował plany b. #zastosowali najlepsze materiały c. zlikwidowali problemy z ruchem drogowym w miecie ‘When they built Grunwaldzki bridge (a) the local architect drew up the plans, (b) they used the best materials, (c) they got rid of all traffic problems in the city.’

39 In all examples in (46), the only possible interpretation is that in which two events happen in succession. Consequently, the pragmatic implausibility of contexts (44a and b) arises. Hence, we can conclude that perfective aspect has a very consistent semantics and it considerably constrains the role of Elaboration rhetorical context in the interpretation of the temporal discourses in (46). In contrast to perfective aspect, the imperfective one is an unboundedness operator and as such it does not individuate a new reference time in temporal discourse. Imperfective may denote episodic states or processes and it can also denote repeated states, process and events. Imperfective is in many respects underspecified thus we can expect that it will leave some space for pragmatic reasoning in the process of temporal discourse interpretation. Let us focus first on the behavior of imperfective aspect in is episodic use in a when-clause in the Elaboration context in (47):

(47) a. Kiedy budowaliI most na ulicy Grunwaldzkiej, lokalny architekt narysowałP plany. ‘When they built-imp a bridge in Grunwaldzka street, a local architect drew up-perf the plans.

According to my Polish informants, the sequence in (47) is ambiguous between two conflicting interpretations: one that drawing up of the plans took place in the course of building, which is pragmatically too late; the other (less preferred) that the drawing up of plans took place before the event of building started. This ambiguity results because imperfective only ensures that the eventuality on which it operates is unbounded (has no set boundaries), hence it remains vague whether the eventuality of building a bridge refers to the actual building process or whether it additionally captures the preparatory stage of building. Imperfective aspect used in quantified contexts expresses frequentative eventualities but it leaves it underspecified whether the repeated eventuality is a process, a state or an event. For this reason the anaphoric relation between two eventualities in the quantified context in (48) is exclusively influenced by the rhetorical relation (in this case Elaboration).

(48) Zawsze kiedy nasza firma budowałaI trudny architektonicznie budynek, najlepszy lokalny architekt rysował plany. ‘Always when our company built an architecturally difficult building, the best local architect drew up the plans.’

40 In this case all my informants obtained only the interpretation which is pragmatically the most natural one, namely that the drawing up of the plans took place as predicted by our common sense reasoning before the event of building. This is due to the fact that the imperfective is used to denote plural (iterated/frequentative) events of building different houses. Since the imperfective is used to express the unboundedness of the plural eventualities, the aspectual character of atomic eventualities remains underspecified and it can be resolved by rhetorical relations holding between the when-clause and the main clause eventualities.

2.3.2 The interaction of perfective aspect with the Explanation rhetorical relation

Lascarides and Asher (1993, 2003) point to a strong influence of the Explanation rhetorical relation on the ordering of eventualities in small discourses in English. As discussed in chapter 1 of the thesis, in Explanation rhetorical contexts relating two discourse constituents, the textually subsequent situation explains why the situation in the first textual constituent happened, thus yielding the temporal inverse ordering in English, as illustrated in (49-52).

(49) Max fell. John pushed him. (50) Jane left me. She fell in love with somebody else. (51) I left the party early. My babysitter phoned up in a bit of panic. (52) John died. Bill poisoned him.

In all instances in (49) to (52) the eventuality in the second discourse clause is interpreted as preceding the event in the first constituent. Since the influence of rhetorical reasoning is very strong in simple past Explanation discourse contexts in English, it is worth persuing, whether perfective aspect, which is a morphological quantizedness operator individuating a reference time, constrains the inverse temporal ordering of eventualities when embedded in this rhetorical environment. Consider Polish counterparts of (49-52) in (53):

(53) a. Max upadłP. # Jan go popchnłP. ‘Max fell. John pushed him.’ b. Widownia si zamiałaP. # Prowadzcy powiedziałP art. ‘The audience (inc)-laughed. The speaker told a joke.’ c. Jan złamałP nog. ?? SkoczyłP z wysokiego muru. ‘John broke his leg. He jumped down from the high wall.’

41 d. Maria zerwałaP ze mn. ?? ZnalazłaP innego mczyzn. ‘Mary broke up with me. She found another man.’ e. Jan umarłP. Jacek go otrułP. ‘John died. Jack poisoned him.’

As expected, perfective aspect in Polish prevents the interpretation of reverse temporal ordering in most of the contexts in (53). According to my Polish informants, the prevailing interpretation of (53a) and (b) is that of a sequence, but since such interpretation is not pragmatically acceptable my informants suggested the application of an additional linguistic device such as because. Additionally, changes in intonation turned out to be a useful rhetorical device in enhancing the explanatory interpretation in examples (53c) and (d). These gave rise to varying acceptability results when uttered with default discourse intonation, but application of inter-sentential pause and strong explanatory intonation facilitated correct pragmatic interpretation. Only example (53e) was invariably interpreted as an instance of reverse temporal ordering, because of the strong causal relation between the eventuality of dying and that of poisoning someone. These observations strongly indicate that the lexically expressed quantized denotation of perfective verbs results in the individuation of a reference time. As a result, perfective aspect applied in the first discourse constituent in the Explanation context leaves hardly any space for rhetorical reasoning especially when these contexts are pronounced with the default narrative intonation. Only the application of other rhetorical devices like the connective because or a pause and causal intonation or an exceptionally strong causal link between eventualities can overrule the semantic impact of perfective aspect in Polish. The complete blocking of the Explanation rhetorical relation is licensed in complex temporal sentences with perfective aspect marked on verbs in pre-posed when-clause, as shown in (54): (54) a. #Kiedy Max upadłP, Jan go popchnłP. ‘When Max fell, John pushed him.’ b. #Kiedy widownia si zamiałaP, prowadzcy powiedziałP art. ‘When the audience (inc)-laughed, the speaker told a joke.’ c. #Kiedy Jan złamałP nog, skoczyłP z wysokiego muru. ‘When John broke his leg, he jumped down from the high wall.’ d. #Kiedy Maria zerwałaP ze mn, znalazłaP innego mczyzn. ‘When Mary broke up with me, she found another man.’

42 This observation corresponds to de Swart’s generalization that neither preposed nor postposed when-clauses express a succession of events in which the event described by the when-clause follows the main clause event, even if this is favored by world knowledge. This is specifically determined by the following constraint postulated by de Swart and de Hoop (2000):

‘TA: temporal adjuncts do not function as α in a rhetorical relation R (α,β)’

This generalization accounts for contexts in (54) in which even the strong Explanation rhetorical context does not give rise to inverse temporal ordering of eventualities in both clauses. This claim captures not only the contexts in (54) where the when-clause is syntactically topicalized and as such it is interpreted as old information providing rhetorical and temporal reference for the main clause. De Hoop and de Swart’s TA constraint is additionally supported by the fact that in the Explanation rhetorical environment the inverse temporal ordering between an eventuality in the postposed when-clause and an eventuality in the main clause is blocked as well, as shown in Polish examples in (55):

(55) a. # Jan popchnłP Zosi, kiedy upadłaP. ‘John pushed Sopia, when she fell.’ b. #Prowadzcy powiedziałP art, kiedy widownia si zamiałaP. ‘The speaker told a joke, when the audience (inc)-laughed.’ c. # Jan skoczyłP z wysokiego muru, kiedy złamałP nog. ‘John jumped down from the high wall, when he broke his leg.’ d. # Maria znalazłaP innego mczyzn, kiedy zerwałaP ze mn. ‘Mary found another man, when she broke up with me.’ e. # Jacek otrułP Jol, kiedy umarłaP. ‘Jack poisoned Jola, when she died.’

Interestingly, there are some contexts in Polish in which eventualities in when-temporal adjuncts can function as α in a rhetorical relation R (α,β). These are complex temporal sentences with postposed when-clauses and with a contrastive particle TO expressed in main clauses, as shown in (56):

43 (56) a. To Jan mnie popchnłP, kiedy upadłamP. ‘TO(it was) John (who) pushed me, when I fell.’ b. To Cezary Pazura powiedziałP art, kiedy widownia si zamiałaP. ‘TO(it was) Cezary Pazura (who) told a joke, when the audience (inc)-laughed’ c. To z tego muru skoczyłamP, kiedy złamałamP nog. ‘TO(it was) this wall (from which) I jumped, when I broke my leg.’ d. To tego mczyzn spotkałaP, kiedy ze mn zerwałaP. ‘TO(it was) this man (whom) she met, when she broke up with me.’

The when-clause constitutes a topic in these contexts, (it provides old information). They can be informally paraphrased as ‘In the situation in which I fell (which we both remember), it was because of John (not somebody else) who pushed me.’ The when-clause eventuality is interpreted as rhetorically following the main clause eventuality. These contexts certainly require further analysis which goes beyond the empirical scope of this thesis.

2.3.3 The semantic underscpecification of imperfective aspect in the quantified Result rhetorical context

The last section of this chapter will be only an itroduction to a larger discussion of the variation in the expression and interpretation of eventualities found within the scope of a Quantifying Adverb. This issue will receive an independent treatment in chapter 3. Stated briefly, in episodic contexts aspect obviously serves to express singular eventualities in Polish, Czech and Russian whereas in quantified contexts it can additionally be used to express their habitual/frequentative character. The latter contexts are subject to crosslinguistic variation in Russian and Czech and they are also subject to intra-linguistic variation in Polish. Essentially imperfective in its repetitive use, leaves the aspectual type of its atomic parts underspecified. This underspecification needs to be complemented by rhetorical relations. Let me illustrate this briefly on the basis of a rhetorical relation called a Result in the theory of Lascarides and Asher. As mentioned in chapter 1, a Result relation between two sentences indicates that the situation in the first constituent logically results in the situation in the second sentence, as exemplified for English in (57).

(57) Max switched on the light. The room was bright.

44 In example (57) the event of switching on the light brings about the inception of the state of the room’s being bright. The inception is not lexically expressed in English but it is implied due to the strong causal relation between eventualities in two discourse constitutents in (57). In contrast to English, Slavic languages like Polish, Czech and Russian lexically express the inception of states and processes in the Result discourse context, as illustrated in (58).

(58) Result rhetorical relation (Causal /contingent contexts) a. (POL) Kiedy Filip uderzyłP Ann, roz-płakałaP si. b. (RUS) Kogda Filip udarilP Annu, ona za-plakalaP c. (CZC) Když Filip uhodilP Annu, roz-plakalaP se. ‘When Filip hit Ann, she inc.perf-cried.’

On the other hand, the adverbial counterparts of the contexts in (58) in Polish and Russian (but not in Czech) leave the inceptive meaning morphologically underspecified because imperfective aspect in these languages in its frequentative use expresses the unboundedness of the plurality of repeated eventualities, as presented in (59): (59) a. (POL) Zawsze kiedy Jan uderzyłP Mari, płakałaI/*rozpłakałaP si. b. (RUS) Vsegda kogda Jan bilI Annu, ona plakalaI/* zaplakalaP c. (CZC) Vzdyćky když Honza uhodilP Marii, rozplakalaP se/?plakalaI ‘Always when John hit Mary, she cried.’

Regardless of this morphological underspecification, receivers of the messages of the type exemplified in (59) are able to imply the inceptive meaning of quantified states and processes on the basis of the strong contingent/causal relation between eventualities in the rhetorical Result contexts. A detailed explanation of the patterns of the crosslinguistic and intralinguistic variation in the expression and interpretation of adverbially quantified temporal sentences related by a connective when (including preferences in the choice of variants) in Russian, Czech and Polish will be presented in chapter 3.

2.4 Conclusions

The study of the semantics of complex temporal sentences with when-adjunct clauses requires a consideration of many factors like for example aspect, information structure, rhetorical

45 relations and the way all these factors interact. In my discussion of Van Geenhoven’s proposal to treat the imperfective aspect as a plurality operator analogous to ‘s’ plural morpheme in English, I suggest that pluralization by means of the morpheme ‘s’ in English applies only in the atomic domain (it does not operate in the non-atomic domain of mass nouns) which distinguishes it from imperfective aspect since the latter may denote episodic states or processes, (having a mass-like denotation) and plural states, process and events (having atomic denotation). This means that unlike the plural ‘s’-morpheme, imperfective does not operate only in the atomic domain. Because the two possible denotations of imperfective aspect share the property of cumulative and divisive reference, I assume that imperfective is an unboundedness operator. Perfective restricts the denotation of a verb it operates on to a singleton set containing a quantized event. Its quantized reference results in the individuation of a reference time. In my analysis of the interaction of the semantics of the imperfective/perfective aspect with rhetorical relations in different contexts discussed by Lascarides and Asher (1993, 2003), the conclusion was that perfective as a quantizedness operator which presupposes the individuation of a reference time blocks or restrains the impact of rhetorical relations on temporal ordering. By contrast imperfective used to denote singular/episodic unbounded processes/states allows for some, though still constrained impact of rhetorical reasoning in the process of temporal ordering of eventualities whereas imperfective used in quantified/frequentative contexts expresses the unboundedness of the complex state denoted by a quantificational statement and it leaves the information about the aspectual character of its atomic eventualities underspecified. Consequently, imperfective in quantified contexts in Polish and in Russian allows rhetorical relations to determine the ordering between the when-clause and the main clause eventualities.

46 Chapter 3

Quantified eventualities in Russian, Czech and Polish: A bi-directional OT approach

In this study I account for variation patterns found in the expression and interpretation of eventualities within the scope of a quantifying adverb (QA) in complex sentences with when- temporal adjunct clauses in Polish, Russian and Czech. My goal is to demonstrate that the observed patterns of crosslinguistic and intralinguistic variation, including preferences in expression and interpretation, arise from the interaction of ranked violable syntactic, semantic and pragmatic constraints as predicted by bi-directional Optimality Theory.

3.1 Preliminaries about Quantifying Adverbs (QAs)

De Swart (1993) distinguishes such Q-adverbs as for instance often, rarely, usually, always, never. However, she points to a distinction between the frequency and relational uses of often, rarely, usually (never and always are purely relational). Consider the example sentence in (1):

(1) Bastian often goes to a pub with Emma.

Quantifying adverb often in its pure frequency reading establishes no proportion between sets of eventualities. The quantifier simply refers to the totality of events of Bastian going to a pub with Emma and specifies that they happened with a high frequancy. On the other hand, in its relational reading, the quantificational adverb (like other generalized quantifiers) simply establishes a proportion between two sets of eventualities and it selectively quantifies over these sets of events. Therefore, sentence (1) can be roughly paraphrased as Most of the situations in which Bastian goes to a pub with someone are situations in which he goes to a pub with Emma. An essential difference between Determiner Quantifiers and Adverbial Quantifiers is that the arguments of D(eterminer)-quantifiers are in most cases determined syntactically, while the restriction of QAs in simple sentences has to be in most cases determined pragmatically. It is subject to a separate discussion how exactly the distribution of arguments of QAs is established. Rooth (1985, 1992), Partee (1995,1999) and Herburger (2000) assume that in simple sentences the interpretation of QAs is dependent on the placement of focus, as shown in examples (2a) and (2b):

47 (2) a. Bob always drinks [BEER]F in Stair Way to Heaven. ∀e (drink(e) ∧ Agent(e)=Bob ∧ Location(e)= in pub Stair Way to Heaven) → Theme(e) = BEER ‘Every event of Bob drinking something in Stair Way to Heaven is one of dinking beer.’

b. Bob always drinks beer in [STAIR WAY TO HEAVEN]F. ∀e (drink(e) ∧ Agent(e)=Bob ∧ Theme(e) = BEER) → Location(e)= IN STAIR WAY TO HEAVEN ‘Every event of Bob drinking beer somewhere is one of doing so in Stair Way to Heaven.’

The material that is focused in an adverbially quantified sentence is interpreted in the nuclear scope of a QA, while the non-focused part constitutes the restrictor. As a result the ultimate tripartite structure of QA in contexts like for example the one in (2) can be schematically represented as in (3): (3) Tripartite quantificational structure

QA restrictor nuclear scope Always when Bob drinks something in SWH he drinks beer.’

The role of focus in the determination of what counts as a restrictor and what counts as a nuclear scope of a QA has been reformulated in Von Fintel (1994) (cf. Beaver 2003). He claims that the apparent local relation between focus structure and a quantifier domain is not the result of a direct and local mechanism of sentence grammar. Von Fintel suggests that QAs have a hidden domain argument C (a resource domain variable) whose content is resolved pragmatically via its anaphoric relation with a discourse topic. What is a discourse topic? Von Fintel states that intuitively speaking topics are questions, implicit or explicit and every statement is uttered against the background of such discourse topics, which is informally captured in a nice aphorism by Collingwood: ‘Every statement that anybody ever makes is made in answer to a question.’ Von Fintel advances a hypothesis that the apparent relation between Focus and a restrictor of a QA results from the fact that both Focus and the hidden domain of a QA are anaphorically dependent on the same discourse topic. So there is a triangle relationship between a discourse topic, a quantifier restriction and focus in the nuclear scope, as visualized in (4):

48 (4) Discourse Topic

Quantifier Domain Focus

In fact, Doetjes (1997) shows cross-linguistic evidence that this hidden domain is sometimes morphologically specified, so QAs are like QPs. De Swart (1993) observes that there are contexts in which the restriction of the resource domain of QAs is specified grammatically. This is the case in the adverbially quantified complex sentences with when-temporal adjunct clauses, exemplified in (5):

(5) a. Usually when Ann visits (e1) me, she brings my favorite candies (e2).

b. When John walked (e1), he often whistled (e2).

c. When Bob drives (e1), he rarely gets angry (e2).

d. When Mary met (e1) John, she ALWAYS smiled at him (e2).

Assuming Bach’s (1984) and De Swart’s (1991) treatment of tenseless clauses as denoting sets of eventualities which are members of the domain of eventualities 9 and further assuming De Swart’s (1991) treatment of QAs as expressing two-place relations between sets of eventualities, we can state that the set of eventualities expressed in the pre-posed (syntactically topicalized) adverbial clauses in (5) restrict the quantifier and combine with the set of eventualities in the main clauses which constitue the nuclear scope10. QA binds the event variable e1 and induces existential closure over the second set denoted by e2. If the QA is in the sentence initial position or in the VP of the main clause, it c-commands the subordinate clause, and thus can have scope over it. Tense takes wide scope over the adverb of quantification as pointed out in Partee (1984) and De Swart (1993). It has been additionally observed that in contrast to post-posed when-clauses, the pre-posed ones always provide a restrictor of a QA. It happens so because the base-position of when-clauses is the post-posed one and when they are pre-posed they land in a position of a sentential topic. Since sentential topics are anaphoric to a discourse topic, the topicalized when-clauses always determine the

9 Every eventuality is either an event, state or a process, = E ∪ S ∪ P. Eventualities belonging to the domain can enter into the relations of precedence, coincidence and join operation which combines atomic temporal elements into homogeneous states or processes which in turn, together with events, can undergo a join operation to form plural individuals of processes, states or events (cf. Bach (1986) related to Link (1983)). 10 The role of information structure in determinig how the material from when and main clauses is mapped onto restrictor and nuclear scope in quantification structure goes beyond the scope of this paper. For details, the reader is referred to Rooth (1985).

49 restrictor set of a QA. In turn when the when-clause is post-posed, what is a topic (old information) and what is a background (new information) is signaled by a prosodic focus, as shown in (6) on the basis of the examples from Herburger (2000):

(6) a. Slavica always reads PRESS when she is on the subway. In all situations in which Slavica is on the subway, she reads press. b. Slavica always reads press when she is on the SUBWAY. Every situation in which Slavica reads press takes place on the subway. (examples from Herburger 2000:70)

Since in this chapter I intend to propose a study of the semantics of Quantifying Adverbs11 (QAs) and their interaction with aspect in complex sentences with when-temporal adjunct clauses in Polish, Czech and Russian (the case of variation), I will focus only on the contexts of quantified complex when-sentences with pre-posed adjunct clauses in order to avoid the issue of how focus determines the quantificational structure, which is not my major empirical concern. I will concentrate on the contexts like the ones illustrated in (5), since in Slavic languages, which have frequently been treated as a homogenous aspectual group, these contexts are subject to an interesting variation. As mentioned earlier in this section, adverbs of quantification relate two sets of eventualities. The set of eventualities in the preposed when- clause restricts the quantifier while the set of eventualities in the main clause constitutes the nuclear scope. Additionally, as suggested by Partee the whole quantificational statement constitutes a complex state. The meaning of sentence (5) is schematically represented in the DRS in Figure 1:

11 Adverbs of quantification, unlike other adverbs do not modify (<,>) but rather quantify over occasions, events or situations (<, <,t>>) or <,<>> (De Swart 1998, ch.1).

50 n s t x y t < n Mary(x) John(y) s = t t Max(s) s: e u = x, w = y e ⊆ s ALWAYS e’ e < e’ e: x meet y e’: u smiled at w

Figure 1 When Mary met John, she always smiled at him.

The expression of the meaning represented in Figure 1 is subject to crosslinguistic variation in Russian and Czech which are on opposite sides of the parametric spectrum (Eckert 1985). It is also subject to intralinguistic variation in Polish which, as originally observed by Dickey (2000), constitutes a transitional zone between Russian and Czech. In this paper, I intend to show that the observed patterns of variation depend on the differences in aspectual systems and their consequences for structuring of temporal discourse in these aspectually similar languages. Since Russian, Czech and Polish express identical meanings on the basis of different syntax/semantics and semantics/pragmatics interface rules, I formalize my linguistic observations in the framework of bi-directional Optimality Theory (OT), which allows me to formulate a very systematic account of crosslinguistic and intralinguistic variation patterns resulting from different ranking of violable syntactic, semantic and pragmatic constraints. Let me start from setting the Optimality Theoretical preliminaries.

3.2 Optimality Theory Syntax and Semantics

People usually succeed in communicating their thoughts to each other via natural language. This suggests that there exists a mechanism of form/meaning optimization regulated by constraints which are universal for all speakers of the same language. In the study of language it is essential to specify the system of linguistic knowledge which makes our communication so efficient. This is one of the fundamental questions which Optimality Theory (OT) syntax/semantics aims to explain. OT regulates the relation between the intended meaning of the speaker and the meaning recovered by the receiver of a message. As pointed out in Bresnan (2001) and Fong (2004:10) meaning is the language-independent universal

51 content and language-specific linguistic expressions carry with them their own interpretation of that content. Since meanings of linguistic expressions underdetermine the content (propositions) expressed, ‘we have to search for a pragmatic mechanism of completion which can be best represented as an optimization procedure’ (Blutner and Zeevat 2004:1, as quoted in Jaszczołt 2005:xvii). In OT syntax, optimization proceeds from meaning to form (speaker’s perspective). More specifically, the free generation of forms is parallel to the evaluation of violable constraints. In OT semantics an input form generates possible interpretations which in turn are evaluated in the Evaluator (Eval) on the basis of pragmatic, semantic and syntactic information accomodated in a system of ranked violable constraints which derive the optimal interpretation for a given input form.12 Constraints are reflections of linguistic regularities that are potentially conflicting. Faithfulness constraints require that one expresses or interprets everything which is included in the input faithfully in the output. Markedness constraints have the effect that one cannot always express all the features of the input exactly in the output. The violation of a given constraint results from the need to satify another, stronger constraint. The principle of strict domination guarantees that a higher-ranked constraint takes the absolute priority over any lower-ranked constraint. Essentially, languages may differ in the way they express identical meanings. Different patterns of crosslinguistic and intralinguistic variation arise from different ranking of the universal set of constraints.

3. 3 An OT syntax approach to variation in expression of quantified temporal sentences with when-adjunct clauses in Czech and Russian

With all the essential theoretical facts in mind, let us concentrate on the actual patterns of variation in the expression of perfective and imperfective aspect in complex temporal when- sentences in Czech, Polish and Russian. Eckert (1985) observed that when a Russian verb stands in a repetitive temporal context, the imperfective form must be used irrespective of the nature of the eventuality description it denotes, as demonstrated in (7-11). Czech marks the eventive meaning overtly by means of perfective viewpoints and frequency meaning is expressed by a Q-adverb solely as shown in (12-16).

12 Suboptimal candidates are eliminated as a group. If a candidate has been excluded due to its violation of some constraint, all other candidates that violate the same constraint even more severely are also excluded driven by harmonic bounding.

52 ‘Repetition makes the internal properties of the subevent opaque in Russian; distinctions of verbal action types and verb classes are not expressed under repetition. In Czech however, the repeated sequence is transparent and hence the aspectual character of individual subevents is transparent. (...) Repetition in Czech is not encoded morphologically through aspectual forms (unless regularity or expectedness of repetition are emphasized) but lexically by adverbial expression of repetition).’ (Eva Eckert 1985: 179) Russian: (Nadya Goldberg p.c.)

I I (7) Kazhdyi raz kogda on PADAL , on VSTAVAL . Every time when he fall-imp-past, he stand up-imp-past. ‘Whenever he fell, he stood up.’ I I (8) Vsegda kogda odinokii moryak DOPLYVAL do berega, on RASKIDYVAL palatku i I RAZVODIL koster. Always when the lonely sailor towards-swim-imp-past to the shore, he pitch-imp-past a tent and light-imp-past a fire. ‘Every time the lonely sailor reached the shore, he pitched up a tent and lit a fire.’ I I (9) Vsegda kogda on PIL teploe moloko, on KRASNEL . Always when he drink-imp-past a glass of warm milk, there occur-imp-past a blush on his face. ‘Always when he drank a glass of warm milk, there occured a blush on his face.’ I I (10) Vsegda kogda on DOSTIGAL vershiny, on ZAZHIGAL signali’nye ogni. Always when he reach-imp-past the top, he give-imp-past smoke signals. ‘Always when he reached the mountain top, he gave smoke signals.’ I I (11) Vsegda kogda Jan BIL Annu, ona PLAKALA Always when Jan beat-imp-past Anna, she cry-imp-past. ‘Always when he beat her, she cried.’

53 Czech: (Jakub Dotlacil p.c.) P P (12) Pokaždé když SPADL , tak VSTAL . Always when perf-fall-past then perf-stand up-past. ‘Whenever he fell, he stood up.’ P P P (13) Pokaždé když námo ník P IPLAVAL , k pláži tak POSTAVIL stan a ROZDLAL ohe. Always when sailor perf(toward)-swim-past to shore then perf-pitch-past tent and perf-make-past fire. ‘Every time the lonely sailor reached the shore, he pitched up a tent and lit a fire.’ P P (14) Pokaždé když VYPIL , sklenici mlíka tak ZRUDNUL . Always when perf-drink-past glass milk then perf-blush-past. ‘Always when he drank a glass of warm milk, there occured a blush on his face.’ P P (15) Pokaždé když VYSTOUPIL na vrchol tak POSLAL kou ové signály. Always when perf-climb-past on top then perf-send-past smoke signals. ‘Always when he reached the mountain top, he gave smoke signals.’ P P (16) Vzdyćky když Honza UHODIL Marii, ROZPLAKALA se. Always when Honza perf-beat-past Maria, she perf-cry-past. ‘Always when John hit Mary, she cried.’

In order to account for this systematic parametric difference between Czech and Russian in OT terms, it is necessary to construct the set of constraints whose ranking predicts the optimal form expressing quantified eventive meaning (as illustrated in Figure 1) in these languages. Faithful expression of the frequeantative/distributive character of eventualities found within the scope of a quantifier is advocated in the constraint which I dub MaxHab and which is specified in (17):

(17) MAXHAB: MARK THE DISTRIBUTIVE CHARACTER OF EVENTUALITIES ON VERBS THAT ARE INTERPRETED IN THE SCOPE OF ADVERBIAL QUANTIFICATION. (insipired by MaxNeg– mark ‘negative variables’ de Swart 2004:7) Result: Input: frequency meaning ‰ Output: In Slavic imperfective verbal form.

Another important aspect of meaning which calls for faithful expression in the scheme given in Figure 1 is the eventive character of subsequent eventualities. In DRT, events ensure progression in temporal discourse by introducing a new reference time. In Polish, Czech and

54 Russian, the perfective operator serves to express eventive meaning which is advocated by the constraint FaithED described in (18).

(18) FAITHED: FAITH EVENTUALITY DESCRIPTION (FAITH EVENT/STATE/PROCESS). Result:

Input: /when event1 ‰ event2/ ‰ Output: perfective viewpoints /when process/state ‰ state/process‰ Output: imperfective viewpoints

The variation in the expression of quantified sequential meaning in Russian and Czech arises from different ranking of these constraints, as demonstrated in Tableau 1 and Tableau 2 respectively:

Tableau 1:

Russian

Meaning Form MaxHab FaithED

I Always when fall -past (event1)

up.’

Tableau 2:

Czech

Meaning Form FaithED MaxHab

Always when fall -past (event1)

Vždy když SPADALI, VSTAVALI. *

‘Always when he fell down, he stood up.’

The variation in expression of quantified temporal sentences in Czech and Russian is determined by the ordering of MaxHab and FaithED. Faithful expression of the distributive meaning of eventualities found within the scope of QA in when and main clauses requires the application of the imperfective aspect as postulated in MaxHab, while faithful expression of

55 the eventive meaning, determined by FaithED, calls for the use of a perfective form in Slavic. Since it is impossible to use both perfective and imperfective at the same time, a conflict arises and it can is resolved differently in Russian, where MaxHab is ranked higher than FaithED and in Czech, where the ranking of these two constraints is inverse that is FaithED over MaxHab.

3.3.1 Polish as a transitional zone – intralinguistic variation

Having established the major character of variation in expression of quantified, eventive main and when-clauses in Czech and Russian, I intend to focus my attention on regularities which explain intralinguistic variation in Polish, which constitutes a transitional zone between Czech and Russian (Dickey 2000). In order to determine possible variants in expression of quantified sequential meaning in Polish, I asked fifteen native speakers for their acceptability judgements. It turned out that Polish shows variation in the expression of inherently eventive eventualities in quantified when-clauses and that it patterns with Russian in expressing quantified eventualities in main clauses, which follows from the tested set of sentences in (19-22):

I I (19) Zawsze kiedy mczyni WRACALI z łowów, cała wioska ZBIERAŁA si przy ognisku. Always when local men return-imp-past from hunts, the whole village gather-imp-past by the fire. P I (20) Zawsze kiedy mczyni WRÓCILI z łowów, cała wioska ZBIERAŁA si przy ognisku. Always when local men return-perf-past from hunts, the whole village gather-imp-past By the fire. P P (21) ???Zawsze kiedy mczyni WRÓCILI z łowów, cała wioska ZEBRAŁA si przy ognisku. Always when local men return-perf-past from hunts, the whole village gather-perf-past by the fire. I P (22) *Zawsze kiedy WRACALI z łowów, cała wioska ZEBRAŁA si przy ognisku. Always when local men return-imp-past from hunts, the whole village gather-perf-past by the fire.’ ‘Always when local men returned from hunts, the whole village gathered by the fire.’

56 In Polish, the distributive (frequentative) character of eventualities in main clauses is 13 obligatorily faithfully expressed by means of imperfective aspect . In this respect Polish is similar to Russian. The major pattern of variation is observed in when-clauses in which both perfective and imperfective aspects are acceptable. Moens and Steedman (1988) and Sandström (1993) state that when-clauses constitute a temporal focus which sets up a discourse referent for the main clause to be interpreted against. This means that the relation of precedence or coincidence with the eventuality in the main clause is evaluated with respect to the when-clause eventuality. In order to determine the regularities behind this aspect of variation in Polish, I constructed a relevant fill-in-the-gaps test which was intended to reveal preferences in the choice of perfective or imperfective aspects in when-clauses. The instruction for the testees was to read each sentence once to get acquainted with the discourse context and then during the second reading to fill in the gaps with only one optimal past tense form of the verbs given in brackets. I prepared two orderings of the same set of 12 sentences written in Polish in order to exclude recency effects in the choice of variants. Since infinitival forms of verbs in Polish can be perfective or imperfective which could prompt the choice of aspect in the tested sentences, the infinitival forms of verbs in brackets were given in English. All testees were proficient speakers of English. The test turned out to show an interesting regularity, which will help me determine the meaning-form optimization pattern in OT syntax terms. Let us investigate a sample of constructions in which my testees chose imperfective and perfective aspects and let us try to sort out the regularity behind the choices:

Part I A sample of data Strong preference for imperfective forms in when-clauses I I (23) Za kadym razem gdy UPADAŁ , PODNOSIŁ si. Every time when he-fall-imp-past, he-stand up-imp-past. ‘Whenever he fell, he stood up. I I I (24) Zawsze gdy samotny eglarz DOPŁYWAŁ do brzegu, ROZBIJAŁ namiot i ROZPALAŁ ognisko. Always when the lonely sailor towards-swim-imp-past to the shore, he pitch-imp-past a tent and light-imp-past a fire. ‘Whenever the lonely sailor reached the shore, he pitched up a tent and lit up a fire.’

13 Perfective viewpoint is marginally acceptable in main clauses in emphatic contexts, as in (21) (subject to further investigation).

57 Part II A sample of data Strong preference for perfective forms in when-clauses P I (25) Zawsze kiedy WYPIŁ szklank gorcego mleka, na jego twarzy POJAWIAŁY si rumiece. Always when he drink-perf-past (a glass) warm milk, on his face occure-imp-past blushes. ‘Every time he drank a glass of warm milk, a blush occured on his face.’ P I (26) Zawsze kiedy WSPIŁ SI na szczyt, DAWAŁ sygnały dymne. Always when he reach-perf-past the top, he give-imp-past smoke signals. ‘Every time he reached the mountain top, he gave smoke signals.’

In examples (23,24) an imperfective form occured in 80% of all choices in when-clauses whereas in examples (25,26) the perfective occurred in 75% of choices in when-clauses. All examples (23-26) give rise to sequential interpretation, but only in the second group of sentences it is faithfully expressed by means of perfective aspect in the when-clause. The question which needs to be answered at this point is what mechanism influences the choice of either perfective or imperfective form in when-clauses in Polish. In examples (23,24) the application of an imperfective form does not cause an ambiguity between a sequential and an overlapping (inclusive) interpretation of subsequent eventualities, because the cause-result contingency relation is very strong. In contexts (25,26) in which the imperfective might lead to an ambiguity between a sequential and an overlapping interpretation which is due to causal reasoning about the nature of two eventualities, 75% of the speakers chose a perfective expression (overt morphological expression) of the sequential rhetorical relation. These contrasts clearly illustrate the plausibility of pragmatic reasoning in the process of meaning- form optimization, which is in line with the theories of temporal discourse of Hobbs (1978), Moens and Steedman (1987), Caenepeel (1989), Lascarides and Asher (1993, 2003) who suggest that that the process of interpretation of narrative discourse is not directly related to the linear dimensional conception of time, but rather to causal reasoning. There are rhetorical/contingency relations holding between eventualities in discourse. As discussed in chapter 1 and 2, the hierarchical structure of discourse is modeled on the basis of discourse relations (also known as rhetorical relations) such as Narration, Elaboration, Background, Result and Explanation. In episodic contexts in Polish and Russian, aspectual information constrains the set of admissible relations. On the other hand, in quantified contexts, the interpretation of imperfective aspect is fully determined by causal relations and other world

58 knowledge. In my tested sentences in Part 1, we have an instance of the unambiguous Narration relation, in which there must be a sequence of events in which an eventuality in the first discourse constituent causes, provokes, leads to, is a natural prerequisite for the eventuality in the second discourse constituent. To put it differently, it is natural to interpret the events of falling and getting up as well as reaching the shore and pitching up a tent as sequential. On the other hand, the eventualities in Part 2 discourses are ambiguous between Narration and Elaboration discourse relations. Elaboration establishes coincidence relation between two eventualities. It is plausible to interpret eventualities of drinking a glass of warm milk and blushing as well as reaching the mountain top and giving smoke signals as overlapping or sequential. I suggest, that faithful expression of the intended rhetorical relation is required by a constraint FaithRS, specified in (27):

(27) FAITHRS: RESPECT RHETORICAL STRUCTURE.

In Russian and Czech, parametric difference in the expression of quantified, sequential character of the chain of eventualities resides in a different ranking of the two faithfulness constraints MaxHab (mark distributive character of eventualities on verbs that are interpreted in the scope of adverbial quantification) and FaithED (faith eventuality description or faith event/state/process). Czech promotes the faithful expression of an eventuality description while Russian favours faithfulness in the expression of the distributive/frequentative character of eventualities in both clauses. In Polish, as it follows from examples (19), (20) above, the frequentative/distributive character of eventualities is obligatorily expressed in main clauses whose denotation constitutes the nuclear scope in the quantification structure. Interestingly, there is a variation in the faithful expression of either eventive or frequentative meaning of preposed when-clauses functioning as the restrictor in the quantification structure. This distinction is captured by splitting the MaxHab constraint into two versions stated in (28) and (29):

(28) MAXHAB IN THE MAIN CLAUSE: MARK THE DISTRIBUTIVE CHARACTER OF EVENTUALITIES THAT ARE INTERPRETED IN THE NUCLEAR SCOPE OF ADVERBIAL QUANTIFICATION. Result: Input: frequency meaning ‰ Output: In Slavic imperfective verbal form.

(29) MAXHAB IN WHEN-CLAUSE: MARK THE DISTRIBUTIVE CHARACTER OF EVENTUALITIES THAT ARE INTERPRETED IN THE RESTRICTOR SCOPE OF ADVERBIAL QUANTIFICATION. Result: Input: frequency meaning ‰ Output: In Slavic imperfective verbal form.

59 Preferences in the choice of imperfective and perfective aspect in the when-clauses in Polish resutl from the optimization procedure governed by the ranking of the suggested constraints as shown in Tableau 3 and Tableau 4 respectively.

Tableau 3 – Polish – preferences in the choice of perfective or imperfective viewpoint in the when-clause MaxHab MaxHab in Input meaning Output form in the main FaithRS the when- clause clause

I Always when ? Zawsze kiedy DOPŁYWAŁ do reach-past the shore-(event1) brzegu, I

P Zawsze kiedy DOPŁYNŁ I * ROZBIJAŁ namiot.

P ZAWSZE KIEDY DOPŁYNŁ , P * * ROZBIŁ namiot.

I Zawsze kiedy DOPŁYWAŁ do brzegu, P * ROZBIŁ namiot

‘Always when he reached the shore,

he pitched a tent.'

Tableau 4

MaxHab MaxHab in Input meaning Output form in the main FaithRS the when- clause clause Always when I she drink a glass of hot Zawsze kiedy PIŁA szklank gorcego milk-past (event1) < mleka, * I occur-past a blush on her rumieniec POJAWIAŁ SI na jej twarzy face (event2)

P ?Zawsze kiedy WYPIŁA -past szklank gorcego mleka, * I rumieniec POJAWIAŁ SI na jej twarzy

P Zawsze kiedy WYPIŁA szklank gorcego mleka, rumieniec POJAWIŁ * * P SI na jej twarzy

I Zawsze kiedy PIŁA szklank gorcego mleka, * * P rumieniec POJAWIŁ SI na jej twarzy

‘Always when she drank (a glass) of hot milk, a blush occured on her face.’

60 MAXHAB IN THE MAIN CLAUSE guarantees that the plural (distributive) character of eventualities found within the nuclear scope of a QA is expressed by imperfective aspect. The variation in expression of distributive, eventive meaning in the when-clauses in Polish is influenced by FAITHRS, which promotes faithful expression of the rhetorical relation holding between eventualities. For the cases in Part I in which the lexical content guarantees a sequential reading because of an inherent cause-result connection, the constraint would be satisfied at the lexical level (so we do not need to mark it with a perfective form) as illustrated in Tableau 3. For the cases in Part II the imperfective would not realize rhetorical structure since it would cause a rhetorically plausible ambiguity. As a result, FaithRS would trigger the use of the perfective, as accounted for in OT syntax terms in Tableau 4. It is important to note, that the selection of optimal candidate is in line with the principle of strict domination, which requires that the higher-ranked constraint takes absolute priority over any lower-ranked constraint.

3.4 Eventive interpetation of imperfective aspect. An OT semantics/pragmatics approach

In section 4, I explained the role of rhetorical relations in the expression of distributive eventive discourses. The conflict between faithful expression of eventive meaning by means of perfective aspect on the one hand and faithful expression of distributive character of eventualities found within the scope of adverbial quantification by means of imperfective aspect on the other hand is resolved differently in Russian, Czech and Polish. In Czech eventive meaning is expressed faithfully by means of perfective aspect in both when and main clauses. In Russian distributive meaning is expressed faithfully by means of imperfective aspect in both clauses, while in Polish, the expression of eventive, distributive (frequentative) meaning is subject to variation in a when-clause which constitutes the temporal focus and as a matter of fact, plays a crucial role in establishing the sequential or overlapping interpretation with the subsequent eventuality. I showed in the previous section that the choice of perfective or imperfective aspect in when-clauses in Polish is resolved by rhetorical information, that is the ability of the discourse participants to reason about causal, common sense discourse relations holding between eventualities. In this section, I intend to take the opposite perspective and ask how the hearers are able to interpret semantically umarked many-way- ambiguous imperfective aspect. As I stated in my discussion of aspectual systems in Polish, Czech and Russian, imperfective aspect shows different discourse behaviour in episodic and

61 quantifed contexts. In episodic contexts it may denote either a process or a state. On the other hand, imperfective used in the scope of a QA expresses the distributive character of the input eventuality description, which is further open to contextually-determined process of reinterpretation into either a state, a process or an event. In other words, imperfective in a quantified context does not shed light on any particular part of a singular eventuality structure but rather leaves it open to contextual specification referred to as coercion (De Swart 1998). How do receivers of the messages analogous to Zawsze kiedy upadałI, wstawałI ‘Always when he fell, he stood up’ succeed to interpret an underspecified imperfective aspect. I suggest, it is the result of a form-meaning optimization process governed by the ranking of the constraints FaithInt and DORP stated in (30) and (31) respectively:

(30) FAITHINT: (ZEEVAT (2000): PRINCIPLE THAT FORCES THE HEARER TO INTERPRET

FAITHFULLY EVERYTHING IN THE INPUT. (31) DORP: DON’T OVERLOOK RHETORICAL POSSIBILITIES OPPORTUNITIES TO ESTABLISH A RHETORICAL/CONTINGENCY RELATION SHOULD BE SEIZED (Inspired by DOAP – Do not overlook anaphoric possibilities by Williams (1997)) The procedure of optimization is schematically represented in Tableau 5:

Input form Output meaning FaithInt DORP

Zawsze kiedy upadałI-past, wstawałI - ? past. +Hab +Event

+Hab-Event *

-Hab+Event *

-Hab –Event * *

‘Always when he fell, he stood up.’ Tableau 5

FaithInt rules out /-Hab-Event/ and /–Hab+Event/ interpetations as unfaithful ones, since the adverbial quantifier brings about distributivity. In the face of the semantic underspecification of imperfective aspect used in a quantified context, the choice between a +/- eventive interpretation is resolved by DORP which says that rhetorical/causal relations between

62 eventualities should be seized. This ranking gives us the correct optimal interpretation of both eventive meaning and frequency of eventualities in when-clauses.

3.5 Conclusions

An undeniable advantage of an Optimality Theory is that it has the capacity to integrate syntactic, semantic and pragmatic rules which intermingle in the language production and interpretation. In other words, Optimality Theory is a theory of interfaces. It bridges the apparently distinct modules which form an intricate system leading to our fast, efficient and dynamic communication. We have seen how the DRT rules of coherent discourse formation, the language specific semantic rules of expression and interpretation of aspectual meanings predicted by De Swart’s theory of aspect as well as pragmatic rules of contingent, causal, consequential narrative dicourse formation are integrated in the set of violable constraints whose ranking determines the choice of optimal forms in language production and optimal meanings in language interpretation. It has been demonstrated that the crosslinguistic variation in the expression of eventive quantified meanings in when and main clauses in Russian and Czech results from the inverse ranking of two conflicting constraints MaxHab (mark distributive character of eventualities that are interpreted in the scope of adverbial quantification) and FaithED (Faith eventually description). In Russian MaxHab is ranked higher than FaithED, while in Czech the ranking is inverse. Even more interestingly, Optimality Theory allowed me to draw a systematic picture of intralinguistic variation and preferences in the choice of variants in the expression of quantified, eventive meaning in when-clauses in Polish. We have seen that the choice of either perfective or imperfective aspects in Polish when-clauses expressed within the scope of adverbial quantification is influnced by pragmatic reasoning. More specifically, the speakers choose an underspecified imperfective viewpoint in a quantified when-clauses only if the subsequent eventualities form a non-ambiguous Narration (sequential) discourse relation. When the lexical content does not quarantee the faithful expression of Narration (sequential) discourse relation and an ambiguity arises between Narration and Elaboration (coincidence/overlap), speakers optimize their expression by means of overt perfective aspectual form. On the other hand, it has been demonstrated how underspecified imperfective aspect used in quantified contexts in Polish and Russian gets interpreted as eventive. When grammatical aspect does not constrain the aspectual interpretation, it leaves room to pragmatic inferencing which is predicted by the constraint dubbed DORP (do not overlook rhetorical possibilities). DORP requires that the

63 model hearer reasons about the possible discourse relations holding between two eventualities. There are several aspects which have not received attention in this chapter but which still require further research. It is desirable to pursue further the division of labour between aspects and temporal connectives such as when, before and after in Slavic languages as compared to English. There are also several interesting aspects of variation in the expression of bare habitual complex sentences with when-temporal adjunct clauses in Polish, Czech and Russian, which will be the subject of the next chapter in this thesis.

64 Chapter 4 The semantics of bare habitual contexts and their relation to aspect in Polish, Czech and Russian The main goal of this chapter is to account for the difference in the distribution of aspect in adverbially quantified and bare habitual contexts in Czech and to explain why and how imperfective aspect and modality facilitate the recoverability of a tacit HAB operator. In the presence of a QA, aspect serves to express an atomic aspectual type in Czech. Why is imperfective aspect preferred in the absence of an adverb of quantification? Bonomi (1995) in his discussion of related facts in Italian claims that if no modification is introduced by a specific adverb of quantification, the imperfective determines the universal and the perfective the existential reading. I will discuss several counterarguments to his claim like for example the cooccurence of non-universal adverbial quantifiers with imperfective, variation in the use of perfective and imperfective in overtly quantified contexts, the use of perfective aspect in some habitual contexts in Polish and Czech. Especially the last fact, namely that perfective aspect (which tends to individuate a reference time and is in most cases interpreted as episodic) can be used in marked habitual contexts, will receive a special attention. I will claim that perfective bare habituals involve deontic modality. I will focus on an analogy between perfective bare habituals and singular indefinites in their generic uses, which as argued independently by Cohen (2001), cannot denote a kind and their distribution is limited to rules- and-regulations /denotic/ generics. With all this in mind, I will discuss how imperfective aspect and modality participate in the process of recoverability of a tacit HAB-operator. At the end of this chapter, I will contribute to the most recent analysis of bare habituality proposed by Ferreira (2005) in which he treats a HAB operator as a sum plural definite operator over events. The necessity to refer to modality in the discussion of habituality will be emphasized.

65 4.1 How to disambiguate in favor of a habitual reading of complex temporal sentences in English and in Polish?

Both QA and bare habitual contexts are exemplified in (1) for English and in (2) for Polish: (1) a. When our company built a house, we ALWAYS used the best materials. b. (in the 70’s) When our company built a house, we used the best materials.

c. When I bake a sponge cake, I ALWAYS add ten eggs. d. When I bake a sponge cake, I add ten eggs.

I I (2) a. Kiedy nasza firma budowała dom, ZAWSZE stosowalimy najlepsze materiały. b. (w latach 70-tych) Kiedy nasza firma budowałaI dom, stosowalimyI najlepsze materiały. I I c. Kiedy piek biszkopt, ZAWSZE dodaj dziesiş jajek. d. Kiedy piekI biszkopt, dodajI dziesiş jajek.

In the absence of a QA, past tense contexts in (1b) and (2b) are ambiguous between episodic and frequentative interpretations. Hearers need to recover whether these sentences are existentially quantified by default or whether there is a tacit HAB operator. I suggest that habitual or episodic meaning of these contexts arises as a result of the interaction between the Interval Resolution Strategy (cf. Enriss and Hinterwimmer 2005) and the inherent/lexical aspect of VPs. As observed by Barbara Partee (1973, 1984), there is a pragmatic strategy which helps us limit the denotation of past tense sentences to narrower spatio-temporal regions. Partee noticed that if one is in a situation in which he or she is turning onto the freeway to begin the vacation trip and says: ‘I didn’t turn off the stove’, this may be taken to be a true assertion even though this person has in fact turned off the stove several times in the past. The point is that context limits the interpretation of the past tense operator to apply only to certain relevant parts of the past. The PAST operator should be read as ‘for some relevant time in the past’. Similarly, Endriss and Hinterwimmer (2005) suggest that to restrict the domain of existentially, adverbially or implicitly quantified Davidsonian e-argument in tensed sentences means to locate the respective events in time. They suggest that the process of restricting tense operators is pragmatic in nature and they refer to it as the Interval Resolution

Strategy. Simplified semantics for tense information relative to the speech time t0 is given in (2):

66 (2) a. pres(e) := t0 ∈ τ(e) where τ(e) denotes the running time of e b. past(e) := τ(e) < t0

In an existentially quantified sentence in (3) and in an adverbially quantified one in (4) the meaning of PAST operator is further contextually restricted.

(3) a. Yesterday, Peter had a good (s1) time at Mary’s party.

b. He drank beer (p2). τ(p2) ⊆ is1

(4) a. I was in Shanghai in September (s1)

b. When I tried to catch a taxi, I always had to fight for it (complex state s1). τs2⊆ 14 is1 Habitual readings of contexts of the type given in (1b,d) for English and (2b,d) for Polish, are facilitated by extensive focalization times given externally or provided by time adverbials like for example in his childhood, in the 70’s, when I was young ... . Extensive focalization time is not the only and not even the determining factor which helps to obtain a habitual interpretation in the discussed contexts. If a VP in either clause denotes an individual-level state eg. be tall, know French, love Fred or a once-only eventuality eg. cut down the tallest tree in one’s garden which presuppose the uniqueness of an e-argument, it is impossible to obtain habitual interpretation, as illustrated for Polish in (5):

(5) a. W dziecistwie, kiedy lubiłem czekolad, byłem gruby. ‘In my childhood, when I liked chocolate, I was fat.’ b. W latach 70-tych, kiedy cinałem najwysze drzewo w naszym ogrodzie, padał deszcz. ‘In the 70’s, when I cut-imp-past the tallest tree in our garden, it was raining.’

An exclusively episodic interpretation (5a) and (5b) arises because it is impossible to repeat an event which is unique by presupposition. On the opposite side of the coin, there is a subclass of achievements e.g. meet, visit, find, lose, catch which differ from other achievements e.g. reach, die, win, lose in that the former have a strictly punctual character. This means that when imperfective aspect operates on them, they give rise to a frequentative

14 p stands for a process, s stand for a state and e stands for an event.

67 interpretation solely, as presented in (6). By contrast, the latter class of achievements can be contextually coerced into an episodic preliminary states, as exemplified in (7)

(6) a. Kiedy odwiedzałI mnie, przynosiłI kwiaty. When he visited-imp me, he brought-imp flowers. ‘Whenever he visited me, he brought flowers.’ b. Kiedy gubiłI klucze, dostawałI klapsa. When he lost-imp his keys, he got-perf a smack. ‘Whenever he lost his keys, he got a smack.’ c. Kiedy spotykałI znajomych, umiechałI si. When he met-imp his acquaintances, he smiled-imp. ‘Whenever he met his acquaintances, he smiled.’

(7) a. Kiedy wygrywałI, cała widownia krzyczałaI z wraenia. When win-imp-past, all the spectators cheered-imp-past. ‘In a particular circumstance, when he was winning, all the spectators cheered.’ b. Kiedy umierałI, wypowiedziałP swoje ostatnie yczenie. When he die-imp-past, he uttered-perf his last wish. ‘In a particular circumstance when he was dying, he uttered his last wish.’

The class of achievements, exemplified in (7), in contrast to the ones in (6) patterns with accomplishments, activities and stage-level states in that they are ambiguous between existential and habitual interpretation when expressed by imperfective aspect. This kind of ambiguity is mainly resolved as a result of the interaction between Interval Resolution Strategy and common-sense reasoning. In other words, receivers of such messages reason about how many times a given eventuality type can recur within an extent of the contextually restricted interval. The more extensive the interval, the more prominent the habitual reading appears, as shown in (8) and (9):

(8) a. W latach 90tych kiedy budowałI dom, stosowałI najlepsze materiały. (habitual) ‘In 90’s when he built-imp a house, he used-imp the best materials.’ b. W zeszłym roku kiedy budowałI dom, stosowałI najlepsze materiały. (episodic) ‘Last year when he built-imp a house, he used-imp the best materials.’

(9) a. W dziecistwie, kiedy byłI chory, nie leałI w łóku. (habitual) ‘In his childhood, when he was-imp ill, he not stayed-imp in bed.’ b. W zeszłym roku, kiedy byłI chory, nie leałI w łóku. (ambiguous) ‘Last year, when he was-imp ill, he not stayed-imp in bed.’ c. W zeszłym tygodniu, kiedy był chory, nie leał w łóku. (episodic) ‘Last week, when he was-imp ill, he not stayed-imp in bed.’

Since the subsequent discussion will concern the semantics of bare habitual contexts and the distribution of aspect in bare habitual complex temporal sentences with when-temporal adjunct clauses, I will set my analysed contexts within an extensive interval by application of relevant adverbials in order to prompt a habitual, and not an episodic reading. The question that will be relevant in the coming section is whether in the absence of a QA, habitual interpretation that potentially arises in some contexts is dependant on the inherent quantificational character of imperfective aspect in languages such as Italian, Polish, Czech and Russian.

4.2 The distribution of aspect in bare habitual complex temporal sentences in Polish, Russian and Czech

Bonomi (1995) observes that the absence of a QA in complex temporal sentences with when- temporal adjunct clauses changes the distribution of aspect in Italian. More precisely, both imperfective and perfective aspect can be used in complex temporal when-sentences, when a specific adverb of quantification is present, as shown in (10):

(10) a. Quando mi vedeva, talvota il custode apriva la porta. When the janitor see-past-imp me, sometimes he opened-imp the door. b. Quando mi vide, il guardiano aprì sempre la porta. When the janitor see-past-perf, he always open-past-perf the door.

But when a QA is not realized, there arises a contrast illustrated in (11), where imperfective aspect is used in two clauses and (12) where perfective is applied across the board:

69 (11) Quando mi vedeva, il custode apriva la porta. When the janitor see-past-imp me, he opened-imp the door. ‘Whenever the janitor saw me, he opened the door’ (12) Quando mi vide, il custode aprì la porta. When the janitor see-past-perf me, he open-past-perf the door. (In a particular circumstance) when the janitor saw me, he opened the door.’ (13) a. *Quando mi vide, il custode apriva la porta. When the janitor see-past-perf me, he opened-imp the door. b. *Quando mi vedeva, il custode apri la porta. When the janitor see-past-imp me, he opened-perf the door.

Bonomi claims that sentences in (11) and (12) have the following respective readings:

(11’) Every time that the janitor saw me he opened the door. (12’) There was such a time at which the janitor saw me and at that moment he opened the door.

In other words, the first sentence involves universal quantification and the latter existential quantification. Bonomi (1995:94) in his discussion of the interaction between aspect and the interpretation of when-clauses in Italian assumes that predicates carry a Davidsonian e- argument. He claims that because aspect is the only factor distinguishing these two contexts, the existential closure of the e-argument in (12) should be attributed to a specific aspectual value, namely the perfective one. In turn, the imperfective aspect has an inherent quasi- universal quantificational power. In other words, the quantificational interpretation of the sentences in (11) and the episodic reading of (12) arise because imperfective and perfective aspects are associated with different quantificational structures, as stated in the following passage: ‘If no modification is introduced by any specific adverb of quantification, the imperfective determines the universal and the perfective the existential reading. In other words, to these two apsectual values correspond, by default, two different quantificational structures.’

(Bonomi 1995:95)

70 In what follows, in the end Bonomi represents the semantics of (11) and (12) in (14) and (15) respectively.

(14) ∀e([Cont(e) ∧ (the janitor-see-me(e)]R → [∃e’ (e>

door(e’))]M)

(15) ∃e([Cont(e) ∧ (the janitor-see-me(e)]R ∧ [∃e’ (e>

The contrast in the distribution of aspect in adverbially quantified contexts and in bare habitual quantificational contexts observed by Bonomi is reminiscent of the following contrast in Czech:

(16) a. Pokaždé když naše firma stavlaI dm, použíliP jsme nejlepší materiál. Always when our company built-imp a house, we used-perf the best materials. b. Když naše firma stavlaI dm, používaliI jsme nejlepší materiál. When our company built-imp a house, we used-imp the best materials.

In the presence of a QA, aspect serves to express the atomic aspectual type (that is imperfective is used to express states and processes - unbounded eventuality descriptions, while perfective is used to express events – quantized eventuality descriptions). However, when QA is absent, habitual interpretation is preferably expressed by imperfective aspect at least in the main clause. Why is imperfective preferred in the absence of an adverb of quantification in Czech? Is it an indication that imperfective inherently encodes universal quantification over e-argument, as suggested by Bonomi? I intend to present several arguments based on Polish, Czech and Russian which strongly suggest that quantificational interpretation of bare habitual contexts cannot be attributed to imperfective aspect and I will point to an important role of recoverability in the expression of aspect and habituality. First, imperfective can occure with the universally quantifying adverb always in Polish, and Russian. If both imperfective and the QA always are universal quantifiers over e- argument, it is an obvious instance of vacuous quantification. Second, imperfective aspect occures in Russian and in Polish with other non-universal QAs like never, rarely, often, sometimes. They signal different relations between eventualities in the restrictor set and

15 Cont(e) – that i is a contextually relevant event.

71 nuclear scope set. For example, an existentially quantifying adverb sometimes requires that there is at least one eventuality in the domain quantified over which has a particular property, while never requires that there is no element in the domain which has a particular property (pc. Henriette de Swart). If imperfective had inherent universal quantificational power, it would be in juxtopposition with different quantificational requirements imposed by overtly realized non-universal QAs. In (17), I show that in fact in Russian and Polish, imperfective is the most natural option in sentences quantified by sometimes or never among others

(17) a. POL Czasami kiedy potrzebowałamI danych jzykowych z rosyjskiego, prosiłamI Nady Golderg o pomoc. b. RUS Inogda, kogda mne nuzhny byliI russkie dannye, ya prosilaI Nadyu Goldberg pomoch' mne. ‘Sometimes when I needed-imp Russian data, I asked-imp Nadya Goldberg for help.’ The third paradox is related to the variation in the expression of aspect in overtly quantified contexts in Czech and Russian, discussed in chapter 4. Russian requires that all verbs interpreted in the scope of a QA are expressed by imperfective aspect while in Czech, aspect is used to express atomic eventuality type as shown in (18) for Russian and in (19) for Czech. When the atomic eventuality type is an event in Czech, perfective aspect is obligatory. Bonomi assumes that the semantic function of the perfective is to introduce an existential quantifier over the e-argument and when a Q-adverb is present it scopes over it. The question arises, why perfective aspect is impossible in adverbially quantified contexts in Russian. In practice, there should be no such restriction, since its existential force would be overrlued by the quantificational force of a QA.

(18) RUS Vsegda kogda nasha kompaniya stroilaI dom, my ispol’zovaliI luchshiye materialy. Always when our company built-imp a house, we we used-imp the best materials. (19) CZC Pokaždé když konkurenćní firma postavilaP dm, zákazníci podaliP stížnost. Always when a rival company built-perf a house, their client complained-perf.

72 An additional counter-argument to Bonomi’s generalization comes from the contexts in Czech and Polish given in (20), which are clearly intensional but in which perfective aspect can be used in both clauses.

(20) a. POL Janek był takim pomocnym chłopakiem w młodoci. Kiedy go o co poprosiłamP, natychmiast mi pomógłP. b. CZC Jenda byl takový ochotn pomáhající chlapec. Když jsem ho o nco poprosilaP, okamžit mi pomohlP. ‘Janek was such a helpful boy in his youth. When I asked-perf him for something, he immediatelly helped-perf me.‘ c. POL Kiedy pracowałam dla tej firmy przez pół roku, szef okazał si kobieciarzem. Kiedy uyłamP moich najlepszych perfum, zgodziłP si na wszystko o co poprosiłamP. d. CZC Když jsem pracovala pro tuto firmu pl roku, ukázalo se, že šéf je suknićká . Když jsou použilaP své nejlepší parfému, souhlasilP se vším o co jsem jej požádala. ‘When I worked in this company for half a year, the boss turned out to be a womanizer. When I used-perf my best scents, he agreed-perf on everything I asked-perf for.’ e. POL Kiedy dziecko zaufaP dorosłemu, powierzyP mu kady swój sekret. f. CZC Když dít dv ujeP dosplému, sv íP mu každé své tajemství. ‘When a child trust-perf-pres an adult, he/she tell-perf-pres him all the secrets.‘ i. POL Kiedy sobie co postanowiłP, osignłP to. f. CZC Když se pro nìco rozhodlP, tak toho dosáhlP. ‘When he decided-perf sth, he achieved-perf it. g. POL Kiedy co obiecałP, dotrzymałP słowa. h. CZC Když nìco slíbilP, tak to dodrželP. ‘When he promised-perf sth, he kept-perf his promise.’ i. POL Moi rodzice byli bardzo zasadniczy. Kiedy co zbroiłemP, dostałemP klapsa.

73 j. CZC Moji rodièe byli hodnì pøísní. Když jsem udìlalP nìco špatného, dostalP jsem facku. ‘My parents were very strict. When I did-perf sth naughty, I got-perf a smack.’

In all complex temporal sentences given in (20), perfective aspect is used in the when- temporal adjunct clause and in the main clause and inspite of that a habitual interpretation arises. This strongly suggests that when there is no overt QA and irrespective of that the default interpretation is non-episodic (traditionally referred to as habitual), the quantificational meaning does not result from the inherently quantificational semantics of imperfective aspect, since similar habitual interpretation arises in some marked contexts with perfective aspect. What causes the habitual interpretation of contexts in which no quantifier is used in Polish, Czech and Russian? The other option which will be entertained in the rest of this chapter is that thare is a tacit HAB operator that is responsible for a quantificational effect in the non- explicitely quantified contexts. Since HAB is not overtly realized, the issue of recoverability is at stake. Something must signal the kind of quantification (existential or habitual) if it is not linguistically encoded. Normally, the application of perfective aspect in both clauses in temporal complex sentences leads to episodic interpretation, since perfective individuates a quantized event. But there is a strong modal, atemporal flavour of sentences in (20) which brings about habitual interpretation, which allows us to use PERF to express quantizedness. All the contexts in which perfective can be used (20), express normativity, principle, they all could be preceded by To jest/było normalne, e... ‘It is/was a norm that...’ , Obowizkowo ‘Obligatorily...’, I suggest that these contexts involve deontic modality. As stated in Von Fintel (2006:2) ‘deontic modality concerns what is necessary, permissible, or obligatory, given a body of law or a set of moral principles or the like.’ Necessity modals correspond to universal quantification over possible worlds in an unrestricted model. The modality of the contexts in (20) is can be lexical realization by means of a modal particle by ‘would‘ in Polish, as shown in (21).

74 (21) a. Kiedy bym co nie zbroiłP, dostałemP klapsa.16 ‘ When BY-would me NOT do-perf sth naughty, I got-perf a smack ‘ b. Kiedy by sobie co nie postanowiłP, osignłP to. ‘When he BY-would NOT decide-perf sth, he achieve-perf it.

My claim that perfective bare habitual contexts involve normativity (deontic modality) is indirectly motivated by an independent discussion on the generic use of indefinite singulars proposed by Cohen (2001). Cohen (2001) accounts for the differences in the semantics of generic statements expressed by bare plurals and indefinite singulars (henceforth BPs and ISs respectively).

(22) a. Madrigals are polyphonic. b. A madrigal is polyphonic.

A puzzling fact is that the distribution of indefinites in generic contexts is quite limited compared with the ease of obtaining a generic interpretation with bare plurals, as follows from the following contrasts from Burton-Roberts (1977):

(23) a. Madrigals are popular. b. *A madrigal is popular. (24) a. Kings are generous. b. *A king is generous. (25) a. Rooms are square. b. *A room is square.

Cohen (2001) claims that the distribution of indefinite singular generics is much more restricted than that of bare plural generics, because the former, unlike the latter, seem to require that the property predicated of their subject be in some sense normative or definitional. Inspired by Carlson’s (1995), Cohen (2001) draws a distinction between inductivist and rules-and-regulations readings of generics summarized in Table 1:

16 BY – modal particle, NOT-neg. explitive

75 Inductivist reading: a descriptive generalization

Dinosaurs are extinct. Dinosours are huge

Direct kind predication: Characterizing generics: The property of being extinct is Generic quantification refers to individual predicated of the kind ‘dinosaur’ instances of the kind of dinosaurs and it says Krifka et al. (1995) that in general if x was a dinosaur, then x was huge.

Rules-and-regulations readings of generics: Carry a normative force by referring to some rule or regulation that exists in the real world. Table 1

On inductivist reading, a generic statement expresses a descriptive generalization stating the way things are, and its logical form involves quantification; on the other reading, a generic carries a normative force by referring to some rule or regulation (often a definition), and states that it is in effect (exists in the real world). The important hypothesis advanced by Cohen (2001) is that while bare plurals are ambiguous between inductivist and rules-and-regulations readings, indefinite singulars can only refer to a rule or a regulation, since only BPs but not SIs may denote kinds. This is motivated by the fact that only BPs but not ISs can denote a kind when used in a topic position, as illustrated by the minimal pair following Reinhart (1981) in (26a) and (26b):

(26) a. She said about sharks that they will never attack unless they are very hungry. b. She said about a shark that it will never attack unless it is very hungry.

In (19b) a IS in a topic position can only be interpreted as referring to a specific shark. Since every sentence must contain a topic according to Erteschik-Shir’s (1997) topic constraint, we can assume that in examples (23-25b) ISs in topic positions cannot denote a kind. If IS’ cannot denote kinds in topic positions it means that they cannot restrict a generic quantifier (thus inductivits reading of generics are excluded), then the only generic contexts in which they are used is a rule and a regulation context.

76 ‘According to the rules and regulations view, on the other hand, generic sentences do not get their truth or falsity as a consequence of properties of individual instances. Instead, generic sentences are evaluated with regard to rules and regulations, which are basic, irreducible entities in the world. ‘ Cohen (2001:10)

To present his formal treatment of the distinct interpretations of BP and IS generic contexts, Cohen, following Burton-Roberts (1977) considers the following minimal pair:

(27) a. Gentlemen open doors for ladies. b. A gentleman opens doors for ladies.

Example (27a) simply makes a neutral generalization about gentlemen. On the other hand, (27 b), expresses some moral necessity or a social norm. Carlson (1995) assumes that rules are basic, irreducible entities in the world. Some formulas, then, may describe a rule, just as some expressions may describe an individual. Cohen adopts ‘!’ as an operator which maps a formula to the rule it describes if there is such a rule. A rule described in (28b) is represented in (28): (28) !(gentleman(x) Ω open-doors-for-ladies(x))

Sentence (28b) predicates of rule (28) that it is in effect (eg. socially accepted). Cohen assumes a predicate, in-effect, whose extension is the set of all rules which are in effect. The logical form of (28), then, is something like the following:

(29) in-effect(!(gentleman(x) Ω open-doors-for-ladies(x)))

Importantly, in-effect in (29) does not say that the rule is obeyed; all it says is that opening doors for ladies is part of the social norms.

Why do I draw an analogy between Cohen’s normativity treatment of indefinite singular generics and perfective bare habitual contexts? As I stated in chapter 2 in my discussion of the semantics of perfective aspect, perfective is an overt quantizedness operator. It acts like a classifier in the nominal domain in that it restricts the denotation of a verb it operates on to a singleton set containging a quantized event. This explains why perfective is preferably

77 interpreted as episodic. Its quantized reference results in the individuation of a reference time. Similarly, as stated by Farkas (2006) count singulars (including indefinite singulars) in most cases individuate a singular atom by default and as argued by Cohen (2001) indefinite singulars cannot denote a kind. In contexts like the ones in (20), even though perfective aspect is used, the habitual interpretation arises because the context strongly suggest that we are dealing with a rule/principle/norm which according to Carlson (1995) are basic, irreducible entities in the world. Perfective bare habituals refer to one of the existing rules or context strongly suggests that we are talking about a norm or a principle and the perfective bare habitual sentence is used to describe this rule like some expressions may describe an individual. Cohen adopts ‘!’ as an operator which maps a formula to the rule it describes and he applies a predicate ‘in-effect’, whose extension is the set of all rules which are in effect.

4.2.1 Recoverability in the process of communication and its importance in the expression of habituality

In Henriks, de Hoop and Blutner (2006) they postulate that recoverability is an essential feature in the process of meaning-form optimization. Recoverability requires that in the process of communication of a certain meaning, speakers optionally skip the pronouncitation of those elements only whose semantic content can be recovered from the local context. Henriks, de Hoop and Blutner illustrate it by the following two contrasting contexts: If a speaker intends to express the meaning: most linguists drink where the topic of the conversation is linguists, then the speaker may choose to say Most drink knowing that a hearer will be capable of inferring the missing content, which in the discussed case is a noun denoting the set of linguists. By contrast, if the topic of the discourse is, for example the set of people present at the conference, and if the speaker again intends to communicate the meaning: most linguists drink, then the noun linguists cannot be left unpronounced. If the speaker decided to utter the sentence Most drink in this context, the hearer would wrongly interpret the missing noun as the set of people present at the conference. The process of recoverability is related to the fact that in the process of communication speakers and hearers take into account the perspective of their conversational partner. This means that when speakers express some meaning, they take into account the way a hearer would interpret the sentence. Speakers reason whether a reduced string is the optimal way of expressing the underlying content. The principle of recoverability is crucial in the expression of habitual meaning as well. When a QA is not pronounced in complex temporal sentences with when-

78 temporal adjunct clauses, the speakers need to signal either episodic or habitual interpretation of the temporal contexts. In other words speakers need to help the hearers recover the presence of either the default Davidsonian existential quantifier or a tacit HAB operator. Recoverability can help us understand the difference in the distribution of aspect in adverbially quantified contexts and their bare habitual counterparts. The strong preference for the expression of imperfective aspect in bare habitual complex temporal sentences is not influenced by its inherent universal quantificational power, postulated by Bonomi (1995). Speakers prefer not to use perfective aspect, since it individuates a reference time and gives rise to an episodic interpretation in most cases. Therefore they use imperfective which expresses unboundedness - a common characteristics of episodic processes and states as well as frequentative eventualities. Another means which facilitates the process of recoverability of a silent habitual operator is normative modality of the context which is at stake in the perfective bare habitual contexts. In these special modal environments, context suggests that we are talking about a norm and a sentence only describes this norm, hence the a- temporal/habitual reading arises.

4.3 The semantics of a HAB operator

So far, I have provided several arguments showing that habitual interpretation cannot be attributed to the semantics of imperfective aspect, as it has been suggested by Bonomi (1995), Delfitto and Bertinetto (1995). If in the adverbially quantified contexts, these are the adverbs like often, always, rarely, usually, never which can bind e-variables, and if in their absence, the episodic interpretation results from the default binding of e-variables by a hidden Davidsonian existential operator, it can also be assumed that in habitual sentences in which no quantifying adverb is present, the e-role is bound by a silent quantifier that is not-existential. It is traditionally assumed that the habitual interpretations arise because there is a tacit HAB operator, which binds the event variables in the same manner as QAs do. It has recently been argued by Ferreira, that HAB cannot be treated analogously to quantifying adverbs. He advances a hypothesis that HAB is a sum plural definite operator over events. Let me propose a critical overview of Ferreira’s analysis in the subsequent section.

79 4.3.1 Ferreira’s (2005) approach to the semantics of bare habituals

In the most recent discussion on bare habituality, Ferreira (2005) assumes the presence of a silent habitual operator which is a sum plural definite operator of events analogous to a plural definite determiner the in the nominal domain. I intend to test his hypothesis by analyzing Ferreira’s argumentation, with the aim of creating an even more comprehensive picture of the semantics of habituality.

4.3.2 Definiteness in the nominal domain

There are at least two conditions for the use of a definite determiner the in English. It is used, either when we refer to an individual which is presupposed to be unique in the context set like the earth, the sun, the president of Burundi, as shown in (21), or when we refer to a particular individual familiar from the context set, as in (22):

(31) Yesterday, John met the president of Burundi. (32) Yesterday, Clinton arrived at 4 o’clock. John met the president 2 hours later.

As stated in Deflitto and Bertinetto (1995:127-128), ‘the use of the complete definite description in (31) does not involve any presupposition of familiarity: the individual referred to need not be prominent in the context of utterance and the speaker/hearer may in fact have no clue at all as to the identity of the individual who happens to satisfy the content of the description ‘president of Burundi’ in the real world. By contrast in (32), the referent needs to be necessarily familiar or in other words, D-linked. Farkas (2004) states that a definite article the is a marker of a determined reference to a singleton set. A definite determiner is non- quantificational and as such it selects the referent from the set denoted by a lexically headed NP with a special requirement that this individual is unique. This requirement is met if the NP denotes a singleton set (relative to the model or a contextually restricted set of entities). Chierchia (1998) states that the domain of quantification or the domain denoted by different non-quantificational DP descriptions contains singular and plural individuals forming a complete atomic semilattice, visualized in (33):

80 (33) {a, b, c} {a,b} {a,c} {a,b} a, b, c

The individuals at the bottom of the structure are the singleton sets. They constitute reference of singular definite DPs. The individuals in curly brackets are the plural ones and constitute the reference of plural definite DPs. Singular common count nouns like dog are true of individual dogs. Plural common count nouns like dogs are true of plural sets of dogs. Singular definiteness and plural definiteness are represented by means of an iota operator which picks up a singleton set if the definite article applies to a set of singularities, as shown in (34a) the largest plurality if the definite article applies to a set of pluralities, as represented in (34b):

(34) a. The dog = ι DOG = the only dog {a} or {b} or {c} b. The dogs = ι DOGS = the largest plurality of dogs. {a,b,c}

4.3.3 Can the semantics of a Hab operator be parallel to the semantics of the sum plural definite determiner the? 4.3.3.1 Sum plurality of bare habituals

Ferreira assumes following Link (1983) that there are both singular and plural individuals in the nominal domain. In Link’s theory, there is no type-theoretic distinction between singular and plural objects, both being basic type entities. The denotations of the descriptions mother of a one-year old child and mothers of a one-year old child are formally represented in (35a) and (35b) respectively:

(35) a. [SG mother of a one-year old child] = λx.∃y:child(y) and mother(x,y) b. [PL mother of a one-year old child] = λX.∃y:child(y) and mother(X,y)

Ferreira contrasts the semantics of the universally quantifying determiner every with other determiners like the, some, no in contexts given in (36):

(36) a. Every mother of a one-year old child agreed to sign this form. b. #The/Some/No mothers of a one-year old child agreed to sign this form.

He claims that the contrast between (36a and b) arises because every operates on singular individuals while the, some and no among others operate on sum plural individuals. Therefore, the common knowledge about the impossibility of having many mothers gives rise to an unacceptability of the sentence in (36b). In a similar manner, Ferreira contrasts the semantics of habitual contexts with and without quantifying adverbs, exemplified in (37):

(37) a. John always writes a romantic song at the MAIN STREET PUB. b. #John writes a romantic song at the MAIN STREET PUB.

Ferreira’s main goal in his dissertation is to prove that the singular/plural opposition that we assumed distinguishes between atomic and non-atomic individuals in the domain of objects (type e entities) applies to events as well, with plural events being characterizable as mereological sums having singular events as their minimal parts. Like in the nominal domain, there is a difference between QA and HAB in their number requirements, which is at the core of the contrast between (37a and b). Sentence (37a), due to the presence of an overt QA, which according to Ferreira operates on singular events, allows for distributive (iterative) interpretation of an indefinite. By contrast, in sentence (38b) HAB operates on plural sets solely and as a result this sentence is interpreted as follows: ‘John has the habit of writing the same romantic song again and again, always at the pub’, which is pragmatically anomalous. In fact, Ferreira’s observation points to the plurality of HAB operator, but it is not clear why we should treat it as a counterpart of the definite determiner, since as pointed out earlier in the discussion of example (36), plurality requirement is also a feature of other determiners like some and no. Apart from plurality, Ferreira points to another important semantic characteristics of bare habitual contexts, namely maximality.

4.3.3.2 Maximality of bare habituals

Wexler (in press) states that the use of the N presupposes that there is a “context set” C of N’s that is maximal. If N is singular in the N, the implication of maximality is that C has exactly one element (uniqueness). If N is plural, the entailment of maximality is that the N refers to a maximal set C of size at least 2. Ferreira (2005) provides arguments to show that like definites, habitual contexts presuppose maximality of the set of entities they denote. As attested by the contrast in (38), only definites and bare habituals in (38a and c respectively),

82 but not universal D and A-quantifiers in (38b and d respectively) give rise to ‘all or nothing’ effect in negative contexts.

(38) a. I did not sign the documents you gave me. b. I did not sign every document you gave me. c. When Bob gets hurt, he doesn’t cry. d. When Bob gets hurt, he doesn’t always cry.

What is peculiar to negative statements with plural definite descriptions as well as to bare habitual contexts is that they seem to validate the inferences from ¬F(A) to ¬F(a1) ∧ ¬F(a2)

∧ ¬ F(a3) ∧ ... ¬F(an), where a1, a2, a3...an are the minimal parts of the plural individual A. In other words, a common property of definites and bare habituals is that negation of the plural set is equivalent to negation of each atom of this plural set. Universally quantified contexts behave differently. In sentences (38b and d), negation scopes above the universal quantifier. As a result, (38b) can be true if I signed some documents but not all, while (38 d) can be true if When Bob gets hurt, he sometimes cries but not always. Informally speaking, negated definites and bare habituals give rise to an ‘all or nothing effect’ while negated universal quantifiers (determiner and adverbial ones) give rise to an ‘excluded middle effect’. Importantly, maximality should not be understood as exhaustivity. In fact, the atomic elements in the maximal plural set in the semilattice represented in (33), are related by disjunction, that is they are represented as {a ∨ b ∨ c} and for this reason denotations which refer to the maximal sum set, allow for exceptions. This is compatible with another observation Ferreira discusses on the basis of contexts in (39):

(39) a. The girls were making a lot of noise at the picnic. b. Every girl was making a lot of noise at the picnic.

It was observed that (39a) but not (39b) can be true in a situation in which there were 5 girls of which only 3 made a lot of noise, because (39a) could be read as follows: There was, by presupposition of the, a maximal set of girls {a, b, c, d, e} of which {a ∨ b ∨ c ∨ d ∨ e} were making a lot of noise while (39b) can be read as follows: there was a contextually established set of girls {a, b, c, d, e} of which {a ∧ b ∧ c ∧ d ∧ e} were making a lot of noise. A similar contrast is licensed between universally quantified and bare habitual temporal contexts, presented in (40):

83 (40) a. When John arrives at work, he is always on time. b. When John arrives at work, he is on time. (40a) licenses the following inference:

When John arrives at work, he is always on time. John has just arrived at work. ∴He is on time. By contrast, the same cannot be inferred in (30b)

When John arrives at work, he is on time John has just arrived at work. ¬∴He is on time.

Ferreira claims, however, that even though (40b) allows for exceptions it should be treated as equivalent to definite descriptions rather than to the generic ones, which can be overtly signaled by adverbs like generally, normally, usually. He supports this view by referring to a hypothetical situation in which both a bare habitual and a generic statement can be used, and compares their meaning effects. Let us consider it: In a situation when John is evaluated by the bosses in his company, and his co-worker says: When John arrives at work, he is on time, as compared to When John arrives at work, he is generally on time, the latter is much stronger in signalling exceptions. Ferreira treats this as an indication that bare habituals are more like definite descriptions than like generic statements. It appears, however, that even among purely generic statements there are different degrees of acceptance of exceptions. For example the generic statement Ravens are black allows for fewer exceptions than Turtles live till they are hundred. It turns out then, that in fact plurality and maximality are important features of bare habitual contexts, as Ferreira suggests, but they are not sufficient to draw an analogy between habituals and definites. In De Swart and Farkas (2005), they consider a typological distinction between languages like English, as well as other Germanic languages, which use bare plurals to express generalizations such as ‘Dogs are intelligent’ or ‘Dinosaurs are extinct’ and languages like Hungarian and Romance languages which use definites in the same contexts, so one would rather say something like ‘The dogs are intelligent’ and ‘The dinosaurs are extinct’. The source of this distinction in the use of definite article resides in that the former group of languages uses the to express faithfully /+maximality, +familiarity/ features of meaning of nominal phrases while the latter group of languages uses the to express faithfully

84 /+maximality/. What it implies is that definiteness and genericity in the nominal domain have /+maximality/ in common. This indicates that the fact that definiteness and bare habituality share sum plurality and maximality does not sufficiently motivate Ferreira’s claim that HAB operator and a definite determiner the are semantically equivalent. It appears that maximality and plurality are also characteristic features of generic statements. If the assumption that denotations whose characteristic feature is maximality allow for exceptions is true (due to the disjoint relation between elements in the maximal set), it would be equally plausible to draw an analogy between habitual statements and generic statements, which allow for exceptions, as follows from the inference patterns in (41) for generic contexts and (42) for bare habitual contexts:

(41) a. Turtles live till they are 100. Bambi is a turtle. ¬∴Bambi will live till 100. b. Children like candies. Andy is a kid. ¬∴Andy likes candies. c. The Polish drink vodka. Dorota is Polish. ¬∴Dorota likes vodka. (42) a. When John is on the subway, he reads daily magazines. John is on the subway. ¬∴ John is reading a daily magazine. b. When I meet a stranger, my dog barks. I have just met a stranger. ¬∴My dog barked.

Both generic contexts and bare habitual contexts have maximality in common, since they both presuppose the existence of a sum plural maximal set of relevant entities (either individuals or events) and they both allow for exceptions. There are some criteria, however, which indicate that HAB operator cannot be treated as a GEN operator. Zwarts (1992) as quoted in Schoorlemmer (1995:115) claims that the distinction between habtuality and genericity resides in the fact that the latter does not involve e-role binding. I will adopt Zwart’s and

85 Schoorlemmer’s view that it is impossible to treat GEN as a binder of e-variable. The first problem with an approach to GEN (the generic operator on the subject NP) as equivalent to HAB is that GEN coocurs only with individual-level stative verbs, as in (43):17

(43) Chemists like doing experiments.

If we assume, following De Swart (1993), that individual-level statives presuppose uniqueness of e-argument, which cannot be quantified due to the Plurality Condition on Quantification, the compatibility of GEN subjects with statives implies that GEN cannot be a binder of e-argument. The second problem for the treatment of GEN as a binder of e- argument is that adverbially quantified sentences can contain generic subjects, as shown in (44): (44) Firemen are always available.

If both GEN and QA were binding an e-variable, this would lead to Vacuous Quantification. The conclusion is then, that HAB is not generic, is it justified then to treat HAB on par with definites? In fact, there are a number of facts that suggest that it is not. I would like to discuss two of them: first, unlike definites, habituals are non-presuppositional and second, unlike definites, bare habituals can be quantificational, in the sense that they regulate binary relations between sets.

4.3.4 A presuppositional character of definite descriptions

In Russelian (1905) treatment of the definite description in a statement like The king of France is bald, it is assumed that whatever descriptive content is contained in the NP it applies uniquely, that is to at most one entity in the domain of discourse. Strawson (1950) additionally claims that this sentence presupposes the existence of the king of France. Similarly, Heim and Kratzer (1998) state that when one says The twenty-five cats are in the garden, it is presupposed that there are 25 cats and they have a property of being in the garden. The presuppositional character of most determiners does not extend to lawlike statements in which determiners are used, since they are implicitly modalized. Quantificational DPs in lawlike statements, would be under the scope of a modal operator,

17 Schoorlemmer (1995) shows that genericity is dependent on non-eventivity.

86 and this is why quantification is over possible worlds or possible individuals (cf. Von Fintel 2002). Goodman (1947) made a famous distinction between accidental and lawlike generalizations, exemplified in (45) and (46) respectively:

(45) Every coin in my pocket is silver. (46) Every dime is silver.

Example (45) is most naturally interpretated as ‘every coin that is currently in my pocket is silver’ in which quantification takes place over an actual set of coins which exist in the normal world in our restricted model. The same example can in some context count as a lawlike generalization, especially when it is uttered with a special emphatic intonation EVERY coin in my pocket is silver, (it is a policy of mine), which appears to have an implicit normativity/necessity operator (must). Example (46) is contextually modalized, and its most prominently interpreted as a lawlike generalization: to be a dime, an object has to be silver. A similar ambiguity between lawlike and accidental generalization is triggered by a sentence from Dahl (1975) Every friend of John’s votes for Socialists. One reading is non-lawlike that is John’s actual friends habitually vote for Socialists while in lawlike reading habitual voting for Socialists is required of those who are his current and potential friends. The conclusion is that every, even though it is a strong quantifier, loses its presuppositional character in modal contexts. It is arguably impossible to find definite descriptions in modal contexts in English, since they mark a determined referent that is they are obligatorily presuppositional. I would like to point to an important fact, namely that only Past tense but not Present tense bare habituals can potentially pressupose the existance of the set they operate on. Consider the contrast between Past tense bare habituals in (47) and the Present tense bare habituals in (48) in Polish:

(47) POL a. (W młodoci) Kiedy pisałam list do przyjaciół, uywałam pióra wiecznego. In my youth, when I wrote-imp a letter to a friend, I used-imp a fountain pen. b.(W młodoci) Kiedy prezentowałI podczas konferencji, uywałI rzutnika. In his youth, when he presented-imp at a conference, he used-imp a projector. (48) POL a. Kiedy Jan si mieje cała okolica go słyszy. When John laughs-imp, the whole neighbourhood hears-imp (can hear) him. b. Kiedy robi biszkopt, długo ubijam jajka. When I make-imp a sponge cake, I beat-imp eggs for a long time.

Past Tense bare habitual sentences in (47) can be read either as presuppositional generalizations ‘In some relevant past period, all actual past events of my writing a letter to my friends were such that I used a fountain pen’ or as lawlike generalizations ‘In some relevant past period, in all potential situations in which I wrote a letter to my friend, I used a fountain pen. It was my policy.’ Present tense bare habitual sentences (48) have only the latter, lawlike reading. It strongly suggests that HAB operator, cannot be treated on par with definiteness, as proposed by Ferreira, since it appears to be non-presuppositional in Present tense bare habitual sentences and potentially non-presuppositional in Past tense bare habitual contexts. Additional evidence in favor of modality of HAB operator comes from Chinese, which is a tenseless language and which obligatorily uses a modal morpheme hui ‘would’ in bare habitual complex temporal sentences, as shown in (49):

(49) a. Mali yi kao za jiu hui ku. Mary get a poor grade would cry '...yi....jiu' : no sooner...than... ‘As soon as Mary gets/got a poor grade she cries/cried.’ b. Mali kao za le hui ku. Mary get a poor grade Asp would cry ‘When Mary gets/got a poor grade, she cries/cried.’

Another argument pointing to a distinct semantic character of definiteness and habituality is related to the fact that definites are non-quantificational, but rather referring expressions, while some bare habitual contexts clearly point to a quantificational character of HAB operator.

4.3.5 A non-quantificational nature of the HAB operator

As stated in Heim and Kratzer (1998:159) being quantificational means regulating the relations between sets, for instance ‘every’ denotes the subset relation and ‘some’ denotes the relation of non-disjointness. A sentence ‘Every goat is a mutt.’ is understood as stating that the set of goats is a subset of the set of mutts.’ Here is a sample of the relations that common quantifying determiners would express on a relational theory:

88 (50) For any A ⊆D and any B⊆D:

∈ Revery iff A ⊆ B

∈Rsome iff A ∩ B ≠∅

∈Rno iff A ∩ B = ∅

I would like to demonstrate that HAB operator in bare habitual complex temporal sentences, is in fact quantificational, that is it is a binary operator. Quantifiers are standardly assumed to share a number of mathematical properties, like Conservativity, Qantity, Extension, monotonicity among others. In order to prove a quantificational character of HAB operator in complex temporal sentences, I will test whether HAB features Conservativity and whether its arguments are monotonic. Conservativity is defined in (41):

(51) CONSERVATIVITY QU AB ⇔ QU A(A∩B) eg. All friends of mine are clever. ⇔ All friends of mine are clever friends of mine. All we consider here is the extension of students and the intersection of students and clever individuals. We do not consider happy individuals who are not students. De Swart (1993) reformulates the Conservativity property to the discussion of Adverbial Quantifiers over events, as presented in (42):

(52) Conservativity QE AB ⇔ QE A(A∩B)

Let us test whether Conservativity is verified for HAB in complex temporal sentences, like for instance (53):

(53) a. When Mary comes to my place, she brings my favorite candies ⇔ When Mary comes to my place, she comes to my place and she brings candies. b. When John watched a football match, he shouted every time his team scored a goal. ⇔ When John watched a football match, he watched a football match and shouted every time his team scored a goal.

The answer is positive. HAB operator features Conservativity. The next typical property of generalized quantifiers is monotonicity which can be defined for their left and right argument, as presented in (54), (55), (56) and (57):

89 (54) A quantifier is monotone increasing in its right argument if:

MON ↑ if QE AB and B ⊆ B’ then QE AB’ (55) A quantifier is monotone decreasing in its right argument if:

MON ↓ if QE AB and B’ ⊆ B then QE AB’ (56) A quantifier is left monotone increasing if:

↑MON if QE AB and A ⊆ A’ then QE A’B (57) A quantifier is left monotone decreasing if:

↓MON if QE AB and A’ ⊆ A then QE A’B

Let us test the monotonicity properties of the right and left arguments of HAB operator in (58) and (59) respectively:

(58) When John is angry, he drives with a high speed. ‰ When John is angry, he drives. The entailment pattern from subset to superset in the right argument in (58) suggests that HAB operator is right monotone increasing.

(59) When John danced, he sang and clapped. ‰ When John danced, he sang.

The entailment pattern from superset to subset in the left argument in (59) suggests that HAB operator is left monotone decreasing.

Conclusion: Monotonicity of HAB: ↓HAB↑

4.4 Conclusions

Since habitual contexts are generally expressed by means of imperfective aspect, it is not immediatelly clear whether a given context should be interpreted as an episodic process/state or a habitual eventuality. This needs to be recovered by the interaction between the Interval Resolution Strategy and the inherent/lexical aspect of VPs In the process of Interval Resolution Strategy, context limits the interpretation of the past tense operator to apply only to certain relevant parts of the past. Habitual readings are facilitated by extensive focalization time, though it is not the only factor which helps to obtain a habitual interpretation. It interacts

90 with the lexical aspect. For example, if a VP in either clause denotes an individual-level state which presuppose the uniqueness of an e-argument, it is predicted by de Swart’s (2002) Plurality Condition on quantification that it cannot be quantified and thus habitual reading is not available. In turn, the class of strictly punctual achievements e.g. meet, visit, find, lose, catch when expressed by imperfective (an unboundedness operator), gives rise to a frequentative reading exclusively. In my discussion why imperfective aspect is obligatory in bare habitual contexts but it is not obligatory in the presence of a QA in Czech, I argue against Bonomi’s approach to the related facts in Italian. Bonomi’s claim is that if there is no overt QA, imperfective determines the universal and the perfective the existential quantification of an e-argument. This is implausible because imperfective can coocure with a universal quantifier always (vacuous quantification). It can also coocure with non-universal adverbial quantifiers (juxtopposition in quantificational requirements). Additionally, imperfective is obligatory in overtly adverbially quantified contexts in Russian. If perfective had an inherent existential quantifiaction, which could be overriden by a QA (scoping higher), there should be no restriction for its use in Russian QA contexts. Essentially, there are peculiar habitual contexts in Polish and Czech in which two perfective forms can be used. This is surprising, because as stated in chapter 2, perfective aspect is a morphologically expressed quantizedness operator which is like a classifier in a sense that it restricts the denotation of a verb to atomic (quantized) events which pressupose the individuation of a reference time and thus are preferably interpreted as episodic. I argued that perfective bare habituals involve normative modality analogous to the normative modality of indefinite singular generic contexts (which are equally restricted in distribution) postualed by Cohen (2001). Perfective bare habituals refer to one of the existing rules (Carlson (1995): rules are basic, irreducible entities in the world) or context strongly suggests that we are talking about a norm or a principle and the perfective bare habitual sentence is used to describe this rule like some expressions may describe an individual. Following, Cohen I adopt ‘!’ as an operator which maps a formula to the rule it describes and he applies a predicate ‘in-effect’, whose extension is the set of all rules which are in effect. All these facts point to an essential role of the process of recoverability in the expression of habituality. I assume that in the absence of a QA, the e- argument may be either bound by a tacit Davidsonian esitential quantifier (and the resulting interpretation is episodic) or it may be operated on by a non-episodic (HAB) operator (and the resulting interpretation is habitual). I claim that imperfective aspect and normative modality are crucial in the process of recoverability of a tacit HAB operator, whose semantic content is unpronounced and hence it needs to be recovered from the local context. The strong

91 preference for the expression of imperfective aspect in bare habitual complex temporal sentences is not influenced by its inherent universal quantificational power, postulated by Bonomi (1995). Speakers prefer not to use perfective aspect, since it individuates a reference time and gives rise to an episodic interpretation in most cases. Therefore they use imperfective which expresses unboundedness - a common characteristics of episodic processes and states as well as frequentative eventualities. Another means which facilitates the process of recoverability of a silent habitual operator is normative modality. It is of special relevance in perfective bare habitual (modal) environments in which context suggests that we are talking about a norm and a sentence only describes this norm, hence the a- temporal/habitual reading arises. As it was mentioned before habitual meanings arise due to the acting of a silent HAB operator. In order to get closer to the issue of the semantics of this operator, I contribute to the recent discussion of bare habituality proposed by Ferreira (2005) who treats a HAB operator as a sum plural definite operator over events. I agree that bare habituality is characterized by plurality and maximality, but I show that it is not clear why we should treat a HAB operator as a counterpart of the definite determiner. Plurality is not only required by the definite determiner, but also by such determiners as some and no. Additionally, I provide arguments to show that maximality is a common characteristics of definiteness and genericity in the nominal domain. This indicates that the fact that definiteness and bare habituality share sum plurality and maximality does not sufficiently motivate Ferreira’s claim that HAB operator and a definite determiner the are semantically equivalent. It is demonstrated that both generic contexts and bare habitual contexts have maximality in common, since they both presuppose the existence of a sum plural maximal set of relevant entities (either individuals or events) and they both allow for exceptions. However, it is impossible to treat a HAB operator as a GEN operator since GEN cannot act as a binder of e-variable. It is because, GEN coocurs only with individual-level stative verbs and as argued by De Swart (1993) individual-level statives presuppose uniqueness of e-argument, which cannot be quantified due to the Plurality Condition on Quantification. The compatibility of GEN subjects with statives implies that GEN cannot be a binder of e- argument. Additional counterarguments to Ferreira’s analogy between bare habituals and defniteness are related to the fact that unlike definites, habituals are non-presuppositional (modal) and second, unlike definites, bare habituals can be quantificational, in the sense that they regulate binary relations between sets.

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