ESD Test Suite Examples

The dog barks every day.
Browne arrived the day of the garden dog.
The dog barks there.
The day the dog barked arrived.
The meeting that day was local.

Linguistic Characterization

English has a variety of expressions which express the location of an entity or event in time or space but which do not specify any particular relationship between the entity/event and the location. These expressions include temporal modifiers, such as now, when, every day, the day after you met Sandy as well as locative ones including here, there and where. In the semantics, we characterize these expressions as introducing both an entity (and its associated quantifier) which denotes the location which the event is related to and an EP with the predicate loc_nonsp relating the event to that entity. Another characteristic construction where a spatio-temporal modifier can appear without an overt mark of the type of location relation is in relative clauses whose head noun functions as a modifier within the relative clause.

Motivating Examples

This analysis involves a certain amount of ‘decomposition’ in the semantics; the alternative would be to have predicate symbols such as today_n or here_n which directly take events as the value of their ARG1. The decomposition is motivated on the basis of the parallelism to examples with prepositions contributing EPs analogous to loc_nonsp:

  • The dog barked on Tuesday./The dog barked every Tuesday.
  • The dog barks in the morning./The dog barks every morning.
  • The dog barked in the yard./The dog barked there.

Furthermore, while a lexical, non-decomposed analysis could in principle be given to forms such as today, this analysis does not scale to phrasal modifiers appearing the same use or to the relative clause examples:

  • We arrived the week after the storm.
  • The day the dog barked arrived.

Examples like the following show that the modified element can also be an entity (not just an event):

  • Exports increased 4% from the same period last year to $50 billion. [Attested example, WSJ]

ERS Fingerprints

loc_nonsp[ARG1 i, ARG2 x]

Interactions

Reflections

  • The expressions that give rise to loc_nonsp are analyzed syntactically as either lexical PPs (e.g. here) or noun phrases (e.g. today, the day of the first meeting) which are of a class that can be pumped to PP. In the latter case, the loc_nonsp EP is contributed by the phrase structure rule that builds the PP out of the NP. Similarly, in the relative clause examples, the loc_nonsp is introduced by a syntactic construction.
  • loc_nonsp also appears in the decomposed meanings assigned to expressions such as earlier and overseas.
  • Some temporal nouns can only appear in this construction when they have a modifier or a deictic determiner:
    • Our meeting this week was interesting.
    • *Our meeting the/a week was interesting.
    • Our meeting the week after that was interesting.

  • However, the word every can seemingly turn any noun into one with this property; this likely involves a special lexical entry for every:

    • *Kim phoned Sandy the last freeway exit before the state line.
    • Kim phoned Sandy every freeway exit.

  • The interpretation of every-marked temporal locatives modifying entities involves something subtle about the interaction of the quantifiers. However, this is not specific to implicit locatives but is also found with explicitly marked locatives:

    • The earthquake the day after the eruption was barely noticed.
    • The earthquakes every ten minutes got old quickly.
    • The earthquake on the day after the eruption was barely noticed.
    • The earthquakes on every third Tuesday got old quickly.

Open Questions

  • Could on_p_temp et al be generalized to loc_nonsp?
  • ERG (1212) doesn’t parse Browne arrived the tobacco garden day. Are noun-noun compounds not the sort of thing that can take a word of the day type and make it into a phrase that can function as a loc_nonsp modifier?

Grammar Version

  • 1212

More Information

Last update: 2015-06-04 by EmilyBender [edit]