Institute for Research in Cognitive Science (IRCS) at Penn under the direction of Aravind Joshi and Lila Gleitman for providing resources, a constant stream of speakers and visitors, and a vibrant community which fostered my interest in interdisciplinary work. I want to thank my advisors Lila Gleitman, Robin Clark, and Henry Gleitman for their guidance of this dissertation as well as of my graduate career more generally. I thank the members of the Linguistics department and the IRCS community who provided support at all levels. Special thanks go to the members past and present of the Babylab and Cheese groups, and to Sabine

This paper is mainly concerned with tense in embedded constructions. I believe that recent research -- notably the work by Ogihara (1989) and Abusch (1993) -- has contributed much to our better understanding of its semantics. The proposals made by the two authors are, however, still too simplistic in some regards. Among other things, they neglect the interplay of tense with temporal adverbs of quantification and with frame-setters. To get this composition right is a touchstone for every theory of tense and tense semanticists have been concerned with this problem from the beginning on, as witnessed by the analyses in Kratzer (1978), Bäuerle (1979), Dowty (1979/1982), to mention a few. The claim I want to stress in this article is that in complements of attitudes, we can never have a "referential" tense, i.e., an absolute or anaphorical tense. Every tense occurring there will turn out to be a bound tense. I think this claim is implicit in Ogihara's (1989) analysis, and it is made explicit in Abusch's (1993) approach. The composition of bound tense with the two kinds of adverbs mentioned will require rather elaborate techniques and I am not sure whether I have been entirely successful, but I hope that the solution is basically correct.

Sanskrit presents a classic case of the evolution of aspect to tense. 1 For Proto-Indo-European, the aorist and perfect are reconstructed as purely aspectual categories, with respectively perfective

Kratzer’s (1994, 2000) research on participles has shown that the properties of adjectival-stative and verbal-eventive passives are more transparent in languages like German where the two constructions differ in form than in languages like English where the two are homophonous. While it

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Có˙z on robił przez ten rok? Wszystko, albo prawie wszystko. A có˙z zrobił? Nic, albo prawie nic. What was he doing during that year? Everything, or almost everything. And what has he done? Nothing, or almost nothing. (following Herzen) 2

Abstract. It has been argued that in some languages, attitude verbs shift the reference of indexicals in the embedded clauses [1, 2, 3]. I argue that not only overt attitude predicates but also implicit emotive modality is a context-shifting operator that changes the context parameters. I base my argument on the following three mono-clausal constructions: (i) fake past (ii) fake present, and (iii) discourse initial sentence focus also/even/too. Surprise licenses non-past interpretation of the past tense [4] with negative presupposition. Alternation between past and present directs readers to re-experience narratives [5]. A speaker’s emotion or sentiment licenses wide-scope also/too without explicit antecedents. Finally, covert modal is grammatically represented as a determiner-like element that takes negative presupposition in the restrictor and overt predicate in the nuclear scope [6, 7, 8, 9]. Key words: monster, attitude, fake past, fake present, wide scope also 1 Shifted Context in Unembedded Sentences I discuss the following three types of mono-clausal constructions: Fake Past (1) a. Oh, it was here (all along). b. A, koko-ni {at-ta/#a-ru}. (Japanese) Oh here-loc be-past/be-pres ‘Oh, it was here’ c. Mintian you-le wanyan. (Mandarin) tomorrow have-perf party ‘I had a party tomorrow’ Fake Present in Narratives (2) Picchaa nage-ta. Ut-ta. Ichiro hashi-ru. Oshii. Auto. (Japanese) Pitcher throw-past hit-past Ichiro run-pres sorry out ‘The pitcher threw a ball. (Ichiro) hit it. Ichiro runs. Oh, no. He is out.’

In this paper, we propose clear-cut definitions to distinct temporal adverbs and provide descriptive features for each class of temporal adverbs. By adopting the corpus-based approach and measuring time points in temporal axis, the temporal adverbs listed in Lu & Ma 1999 are revised and reclassified into four main classes namely, time, frequency, duration, and time manner. The descriptive features suffice to discriminate temporal relations and to predict logical compatibility between temporal adverbs and aspects. 1

This paper adds yet another puzzle to the area of perfect--adverbial interactions. It establishes a new generalization regarding the modification of perfects by both past and non-past specific temporal adverbials. The puzzling facts are illustrated in (1)