Quantificational arguments can take scope outside of temporal adjunct clauses, in an apparent violation of locality restrictions: the sentence few secretaries cried after each executive resigned allows the quantificational NP each executive to take scope above few secretaries. I show how this scope relation is the result of local operations: the adjunct clause is a temporal generalized quantifier which takes scope over the main clause (Pratt and Francez, Linguistic and Philosophy 24(2), 187–222. [2001]), and within the adjunct clause, the quantificational (...) argument takes scope above the implicit determiner which forms the temporal generalized quantifier. The paper explores various relations among quantificational arguments across clause boundaries, including temporal clauses that are modified internally by a temporal adverbial and temporal clauses with embedded sentential complements. (shrink)

Intonational focus can be observed on parts of words that appear to lack intrinsic meaning, and triggers alternatives that are similar in form. In order to provide a unified treatment of focus above and below the word level (they do, after all, behave the same in most respects), I develop a theory of denotations for arbitrary word parts in which focused word parts denote their own sound and the unfocused parts are functions from sounds to word meanings. This allows focus (...) theories to generalize below the word level; any differences with focus above the word level are located in the semantics of word parts. The paper also explores phonological constraints on focus placement, and shows that the focusability of a word part depends solely on its prosodic status, not on any semantic factors. (shrink)

A semantics with plural entitles and plural times accounts for cumulative relations between plural arguments and temporal expressions. The semantics equips nominal, verbal and sentential meanings with temporal context variables and treats temporal modifiers as temporal generalized quantifiers; cumulative conjunction, however, takes place at types lower than generalized quantifiers. The mediation of temporal context variables allows cumulative relations to percolate between an argument in a main clause and one in a temporal clause, in apparent violation of locality restrictions. Plural times (...) form a semilattice structure imposed on the set of intervals; no interaction is observed between this and the internal temporal structure of intervals. (shrink)