On the Temporal Interpretation of Present Participles in German

摘要

The goal of this article is to investigate the temporal properties of German present participles, occurring prenominally and in secondary predication, in an event semantic approach. Empirically, the study relies in part on the corpus-based descriptions of prenominal participles presented in Lubbe & Rapp (2011). I will argue that-according to Keshet's (2008) Intersective Predicate Generalization-present participles are always temporally dependent on their sister constituent. If they occur in secondary predication, this sister constituent is the main clause VP; if they occur prenominally, it is the modified noun. The temporal relation with the noun / the main clause predicate is simultaneity (cf. Kusumoto 1999, 2005), but this simultaneity relation can be altered by temporal adverbials like gestern 'yesterday' and fruher 'formerly'. The article will also consider whether there is a grammatically determined temporal relation between a prenominal present participle and the main clause. I will argue that prenominal present participles are dependent on the main clause predicate only if the participle is embedded in a DP with a non-presuppositional (= indefinite) determiner. Non-presuppositional determiners create intersective temporal interpretations: they lexically fix the interpretation of their NP complement (including attributes) as being simultaneous with the main clause predicate. Presuppositional determiners, in contrast, do not fix such a relation, that is the temporal interpretation of the NP complement (including attributes) is semantically free and guided by pragmatic principles (cf. Musan 1997, 1999, Tonhauser 2012). There are, however, some apparent counterexamples to the temporal dependency of (syntactically or lexically given) intersective structures (cf. Kusumoto 1999; Tonhauser 2012). I will show that the intersective interpretation can be maintained if we assume that these examples involve a specific kind of noun, label nouns. These are personal nouns referring to situations that can be used to characterize an individual even when the situation is already over (Morder 'murderer', Fluchtling 'fugitive'). The article is structured as follows: I begin by presenting the relevant data in section 1. Then, in section 2, I present an event semantic account of present participle phrases in different positions. Section 3 examines the role the determiner plays in the interpretation of prenominal participles, and section 4 focuses on cases with a definite determiner. Section 5 looks at some examples which seem to be problematic for the interpretation of intersective structures and introduces the concept of label nouns. Finally, section 6 examines the combination of temporal adverbials with present participles.