ABSTRACT
What does the time span specified by TADV-P contribute to the entire meaning of the utterance? There is no straightforward answer, since there are at least four factors which crucially influence the interaction of a positional adverbial with the remaining temporal characteristics of an utterance. These are:
The nature of the adverbial itself: it may involve a deictic component (yesterday), or not (on Sunday); it may specify two boundaries or just one; it may give maximal or smaller boundaries, etc.
Syntactic structure, in particular word order: TADV-P may appear in various positions, for example at the beginning or at the end of an utterance; accordingly, the temporal components with which they interact may vary, depending on how syntactic scope is organised in the particular language; similarly, intonation may single out focused elements for interaction with TADV-P.
Inherent lexical properties of the remainder of the sentence, in particular of the verb content: the verb may be a 0-state, a 1-state, or a 2-state content.
Tense and aspect of the utterance: there are obvious incompatibilities and interactions; past tense, for example, normally does not go with future adverbs; this presupposes that the constituent which carries tense (FIN) is somehow in the scope of TADV-P, or vice versa.
Any account of this complex interplay immediately leads into problems of language-specific syntactic structure. English, for example, provides different possible (syntactic) scopes from German or French, and the partly different adverb positions in these languages reflect this fact. Since this is not a study on syntactic structure, and since we do not want to commit our analysis to the peculiarities of some specific syntactic theory, we will try to keep these problems to a minimum and confine the discussion essentially to TADV-P in initial and final position in English utterances. This will suffice to give us the basic principles of interaction. In fact, I think that the interactional properties of TADV-P, like those of negation, might constitute an excellent probe to syntactic structure, and we shall make use of this probe towards the end of this chapter and in chapter 10.