A Reichenbachian Account of the Interaction of the Present Perfect with Temporal Adverbials
Janet M. Hitzeman · ScholarWorks@UMassAmherst (University of Massachusetts Amherst) · 1994
guous in any tense, but that in the present perfect certain readings are ruled out because of an interaction between tense and time deixis. I will end by considering three alternative proposals for treating this ambiguity, namely that the adverbial is ambiguous [Dowty, 1979], that it is an effect of the perfect [Kamp and Reyle, 1993] and that it is an effect of the syntax-semantics interface [Hitzeman, 1993]. Reichenbach's treatment of tense Reichenbach proposes to represent tense in terms of temporal relations between three time points: the point of event E (the time at which the event occurs), the point of speech S (the time at which the sentence is spoken), and the point of reference R. In the past perfect sentence below, for example, E is the time at which John's boss asks him to phone in, S is the time at which the sentence was spoken, and R is the time from which the