Domínguez Parrado, Michelli & Weijland (2022), Ignorance and Temporal Prepositions: A new team-based approach

Proceedings of the ESSLLI 2022 Student Session

Ignorance and Temporal Prepositions: A new team-based approach

Sabina Domínguez Parrado, Gianluca Michelli & Elynn Weijland

In this paper, we provide a team-based semantics for temporal prepositions like by and from. Following Nouwen (2012), we distinguish between class A (before/after) and class B (by/from) temporal expressions. We discuss different linguistic data and the inferences that class A and class B temporal expressions generate. In particular, we claim that only class B expressions trigger ignorance effects. We then propose to analyse by and from as disjunctions (e.g. by t is equivalent to t OR before). Finally, we develop a novel state-based system – which builds on Aloni (2022) – that accounts for the behaviour of class B expressions. The novelty of this approach resides in the use of \textit{team-based} temporal modalities as an alternative semantics for temporal prepositions.