Approximating the limit: the interaction between 'almost' and some temporal connectives in Italian

Patrícia Amaral (1) , Fabio Del Prete (2)

1 University of Liverpool
2 UNIMI - Università degli Studi di Milano = University of Milan

This paper focuses on the interpretation of the Italian approximative adverb 'almost' by primarily looking at cases in which it modifies temporal connectives, a domain which, to our knowledge, has been largely unexplored thus far. Consideration of this domain supports the need for a scalar account of the semantics of (close in spirit to Hitzeman's semantic analysis of , in: Canakis et al. (eds) Papers from the 28th regional meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, 1992). When paired with suitable analyses of temporal connectives, such an account can provide a simple explanation of the patterns of implication that are observed when modifies locational (e.g. 'when'), directional (e.g. 'until' and 'since'), and event-sequencing temporal connectives (e.g. 'before' and 'after'). A challenging empirical phenomenon that is observed is a contrast between the modification of and by , on the one hand, and the modification of and by the same adverb, on the other. While and behave symmetrically, a puzzling asymmetry is observed between and . To explain the asymmetry, we propose an analysis of and on which the former has the meaning of the temporal comparative 'earlier', while the latter is seen as an atomic predicate denoting temporal succession between events (Del Prete, Nat Lang Semantics 16:157-203, 2008). We show that the same pattern of implication observed for is attested when modifies overt comparatives, and propose a pragmatic analysis of this pattern that uniformly applies to both cases, thus providing new evidence for the claim that is underlyingly a comparative. A major point of this paper is a discussion of the notion of scale which is relevant for the semantics of ; in particular, we show that the notion of Horn (entailment-based) scale is not well-suited for handling modification of temporal connectives, and that a more general notion of scale is required in order to provide a uniform analysis of as a cross-categorial modifier.

Mots clés: Approximative adverbs; Scalar adverbs; Temporal connectives; Focus semantics

Patrícia Amaral, Fabio Del Prete. Approximating the limit: the interaction between 'almost' and some temporal connectives in Italian. Linguistics and Philosophy, 2010, 33 (2), pp.51-115. ⟨10.1007/s10988-010-9075-0⟩. ⟨hal-00644703⟩