Bound Tense in Relative Clauses: Evidence from VP-Ellipsis

1 Introduction

We discuss lessons from VP-ellipsis about tense embedding (TE). We begin by portraying two possible views of relative clause TE (RC-TE): one that derives simultaneous readings only by coreference, and another that derives them by binding (section 2). We show data from VP-ellipsis, inspired by Stowell 2014, that support the binding view (section 3), and later review an argument that has been made against it (section 4). The argument is based on the behavior of so-called defective modals in TE and was articulated by Abusch (1994) and von Stechow (1995). In our evaluation of Abusch's/von Stechow's argument, we will claim that their conclusion about RC-TE was unwarranted, and that their data can be explained independently of the RC-TE binding question. Nevertheless, we draw attention to another potential challenge to binding accounts of RC-TE simultaneity, leaving the question unresolved (section 5). We conclude and discuss other remaining issues in section 6.

2 Tense Embedding and Simultaneity

2.1 Background

To begin, consider the example of RC-TE in (1).

1. (1). John worked for a man who sold bibles.                       (RC-TE)

(1) allows at least two readings, back-shifted and simultaneous. The two readings share the requirement that John's employment precede utterance time, but they differ on when, relative to that employment, John's boss is understood to have sold bibles. On the back-shifted reading, the bible-selling precedes the (already anterior) employment; on the simultaneous reading, they are contemporaneous.¹

There are several ways of thinking about (1)'s apparent ambiguity, but for reasons of space we restrict our review to (sketches of) two perspectives. Before we discuss them, we take a moment to lay out our principal theoretical assumptions. We must emphasize that these assumptions are not part of a novel system that we wish to propose. We use them simply to clarify our description of the relevant problems, and possible solutions.²

First, we adopt a pronominal treatment of tense (Partee 1973, among others) and assume representations where tense morphemes are indexed. The indices are mapped contextually to time intervals, but only if the interval satisfies the requirements of the tense morpheme. For example, past_i is mapped to g(i) provided that g(i) precedes the local time of evaluation; past_i is otherwise undefined (see Heim 1994).

1. (2). 〚past_i〛^g,w,t = g(i) only if g(i) < t; undefined otherwise

Second, we add an unusual (though innocuous) semantic rule that composes nodes of the form [t_i S], that is, nodes that have a tense morpheme as one daughter and a node of type t as the other. The rule's output is 〚S〛^〚T_i〛, that is, the interpretation of node S, but with the denotation of its sister node t as the time parameter. We call this rule Tense Anchoring.

1. (3). Tense Anchoring (TA)³

   For any node [t_i S], where t_i is a tense morpheme and S a node of type t, 〚t_i S〛^g,w,t = 〚S〛 ^g,w,〚t_i^〛g.t—more compactly: 〚t_i S〛^w,t = 〚S〛^w,i.

As a simple example, we show the composition of the sentence John sold bibles in (4); w₀ is the evaluation world and u is the utterance time. We abbreviate g(i)as i from now on.

1. (4). 〚past_i John sell bibles〛^w₀,^u

   = 〚John sell bibles〛^w,₀〚^pasti〛u

   = 〚John sell bibles〛^w₀,ⁱ as long as i<u

We now return to (1). Our main concern in this squib is simultaneity in RC-TE, and specifically whether binding might be one of its possible sources. For this reason, we will describe with minimal detail the kind of view that derives simultaneity in RC-TE simply from coreference (between, for example, the two occurrences of past in (1)), and we contrast it with the kind of view that allows simultaneity to result from binding as well.

2.2 Simultaneity by Coreference

Consider the following logical...