Prospective Readings Revisited

• Autores: Zulema Borràs Barber
• Localización: Catalan working papers in linguistics, ISSN 1132-256X, Nº 8, 2000, págs. 23-46
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • In this paper I analyse the Prospective readings of sentences like El Ton cantava ahir, però li van ajornar la funció ('Ton was to sing yesterday, but they postponed the performance'). I follow Delfitto's (1998) proposal for generics and try to extend it to prospectives. I will point out that in prospective readings the event asserted is not the one expressed by the verb, but a complex event created from the material in the VP plus an operator binding the event variable of the verb: a modal operator with a lexical meaning paraphrasable as was to + Infinitive. This idea allows me to make a distinction between the temporal modifiers that are associated with the Event Time of the event of the verb and those that affect the temporal reference of the sentence. I will suggest that in prospective readings, the temporal modifiers associated with the Event Time of the event expressed by the verb modify this event as event-type, not as a concrete token: they behave as circumstantials.