This paper analyses the arguments of a group of philosophers – Davidson [7, 6], Kim [9], Bennett [1] and Parsons [15] – who have worked on the semantics of actions. They argue that inference patterns involving adverbs require a semantics, formalised in first-order logic, in which actions are first-class individuals. In particular, equalities between actions must be meaningful. (We should note, ...

This paper discusses constraints on grammaticalization, a primarily diachronic process through which lexical elements take on grammatical functions. In particular, it will argue that two constraints on this process, namely Persistence and Layering, explain the different distributional patterns of time-relationship adverbs in Japanese, Korean, English and German. Furthermore, it will suggest tha...

This paper presents LTAG semantics of focus and focus-sensitive quantifiers which adopts alternative semantics of focus (Rooth 1985 and subsequent work). It proposes that focused lexical items make its contribution at the level of elementary trees, so that each elementary tree is associated with two semantic representations: its ordinary semantic representation and its focus representation. Bas...

In this paper, we extend existing accounts of high and low readings in counterfactual donkey sentences (van Rooij 2006, Walker and Romero 2015) to indicative donkey sentences. First, we generalize the account to indicative donkey sentences featuring modals that employ ordering sources. Then, we turn to indicative donkey sentences with adverbs of quantification. We discuss the relationship betwe...

This paper reports on an ongoing research on temporal adverbs and deals with the problem of processing a family of Portuguese and Spanish compound temporal adverbs, in a contrastive approach, aiming at building finite state transducers to translate them from one language into the other. Because of the large number of combinations involved and their complexity, it is not easy to list them in ful...

This article gives a summary of the Swedish and Danish data on verb placement in Nordic Word order Database (NWD; Lundquist et al. 2019). The were collected using an elicited production paradigm. I discuss variation four constructions: embedded clauses with respect to adverbs (embedded V2), main preverbal sentence-medial adverbs, clause wh-questions. cover only. results are discussed direct com...

There is much literature about the licensing of complement clauses by complement-taking predicates. However, less has been written adverbs in a clause. This article addresses English evidential extracted from NOW corpus. The discusses three factors that determine distribution clauses. These are nature adverbs, constraints clause and anchor adverb. To explore role these factors, I adopt hierarch...

this paper presents a study examining how persian speakers use metaphoric gestures to represent different adverbs of time, and what these gestures reveal about the concept of time in their minds. a questionnaire containing 10 ambiguous questions, which made the participant use different adverbs of time, was given to 22 participants. they were filmed while trying to answer the questions. the cor...