The dynamic semantics of aspectual adverbs

In ordinary English aspectual adverbs such as in French and English encore/still, ne pas encore/not yet, déja/already, and enfin/finally are used to create temporal coherence in local contexts, as well as to carry prosodic features that directly indicate the speaker’s epistemic attitudes towards the course of events described. In multi-agent contexts factual information, or the content asserted by the speaker, is presented as descriptive information about part of the world to be incorporated into the common ground. But it may be questioned, accepted as true or rejected as unverifiable or even false by its recipient. However, subjective information about his attitudes about what is happening any speaker issues with first person authority. It is logically guaranteed to be veridical and directly referential, since it is caused by privileged access to the speakers private information state. Clauses with aspectual adverbs effectively combine factual and subjective information about what is happening. They constitute a good case study of how temporal information gets shared in the common ground by triangulation between communicating agents in the world. Aspectual adverbs are often used in temporal reasoning, where premises affect the contextually determined reference time, shifting it at times to a later one during the interpretation of the premises. Syntactically, aspectual adverbs occur within INFL in IP clauses describing events, as in (1)-(4), and semantically they contribute new information about the onset or end of the described action relative to its contextually determined reference time.