Carina Kauf (Göttingen) & Hedde Zeijlstra (Göttingen)
Explaining the Ambiguity of Past-Under-Past Embeddings
Past-under-past embeddings like John said Mary was ill have two readings,a simultaneous and a backward-shifted one. While existing accounts derive these
readings via distinct mechanisms, be it by means of an ambiguity at the level of LF or
via blocking of a cessation implicature, we propose an alternative account which avoids
such ambiguity. For us, the meaning of a past tense morpheme, like -ed, is comprised of
two components. Syntactically, every past tense morpheme carries an uninterpretable
past feature [uPAST], to be checked by a (single) covert past tense operator Op-PAST
carrying an interpretable feature [iPAST]. Semantically, the past tense marker encodes
a relative non-future with respect to its closest c-commanding tense node (informally:
‘not later than’), immediately yielding the two distinct readings.