Telling apart temporal locating adverbialsand time-denoting expressions

摘要

This paper is concerned with theidentification of two semantically closecategories – temporal locatingadverbials and time-denotingexpressions. The dividing line betweenthese categories is difficult to draw,inasmuch as there are several phrasesthat occur with the same surface formin the typical contexts of both of them(e.g. in adverbial position and as thecomplement of verbs like to date from).These ambivalent phrases includerelatively simple expressions likeyesterday or last week, but also – a factthat has gone practically unnoticed inthe literature – structurally complexones, like those headed by before, after,when or ago. In this paper, a uniformsemantic categorisation of thesephrases as mere time-denotingexpressions is advocated and some ofits consequences for the grammaticalsystem are assessed. The analysispostulates a null locating preposition(with a value close to that of in) in thecontexts where the ambivalent formsoccur adverbially. A corollary is thepartition of the set of particlestraditionally classified as temporallocating into two sets: the truly locatingones – like in, during, since or until –and those that are mere heads of(structurally complex) time-denotingexpressions – like before, after,between, when, ago, or from.