Tense in non-finite complementation—from syntax to the interfaces
Susi Wurmbrand
March 2025
 

This paper presents a syntactic-based model of Tense in complement clauses, with special focus on non-finite contexts. The various notions of Tense are first separated into morphological, syntactic, and semantic uses. As a consequence, various mismatches arise, and one aim of this paper is to understand these mismatches. The perspective taken is a syntax-first view where mismatches between form and meaning can naturally be modeled via syntax as a mediator between the interfaces PF and LF. After briefly laying out syntactic approaches to Tense where Tenses are treated as time arguments, a model for Tense in complementation is developed that i) reflects essential syntactic properties of complement clauses; ii) derives differences between finite and non-finite contexts; and iii) feeds in a streamlined way into the interfaces. The model follows, in spirit, syntactic Tense approaches as in Zagona (1990), Stowell (1996) and Demirdache & Uribe-Etxebarria (2004), and aligns them with syntactic observations about the structure of complement clauses, in particular the synthesis model presented in Wurmbrand & Lohninger (2023). The main conclusion reached is that simple notions such as “dependent" vs.”anaphoric" tense cannot characterize the properties of complement clauses. A detailed syntax of different types of complements, on the other hand, allows us to align the temporal structure with the independently observed general syntactic structure of different complement types and derive the observed temporal properties.
Format: [ pdf ]
Reference: lingbuzz/008841
(please use that when you cite this article)
Published in: To appear in: Tense in non-finite complementation—from syntax to the interfaces. In The Cambridge Handbook of Temporality in Language, ed. by Seth Cable, Toshiyuki Ogihara, and Karen Zagona. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
keywords: tense, aspect, infinitives, sequence of tense, double access, time arguments, complementation, tense dependence, clausal (in)dependence, pf–lf mismatches, redundancy, deficiency, semantics, morphology, syntax
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