Carsten Breul

The paper provides an account of the semantic composition of perfect aspect sentences in German and English based on the assumption that the relevant semantic information is encoded in the lexical entries for past participles and perfect auxiliaries. These lexical entries are conceived of as in word-based theories of morphology and the lexicon. This is a novel approach to the compositional semantics of tense and aspect. The basic ideas concerning the semantic ingredients of tense and aspect are adopted and partially adapted from work by Wolfgang Klein. It is shown that the central facts of the interpretation of perfect sentences in German and English, both interpretive similarities and differences, follow from the denotations proposed for past participles and perfect auxiliaries and their composition by standard semantic operations (functional application, -conversion). Moreover, the semantic derivations suggested in connection with an information-structural consideration provide an explanation for what has been referred to as the “present perfect puzzle” (Klein), that is, essentially, the compatibility in German and the incompatibility in English of a definite positional past time adverbial with the finite present perfect.

The paper discusses a prominent one of Kratzer’s (1986, 1991, 2012) arguments against material implication analyses of the denotation of (indicative) conditional sentences. This is the argument based on the sentence Most of the time, if a man buys a horse, he pays cash for it. It is shown that material implication makes a prediction that does conform to speakers’ intuitions, contrary to Kratzer’s claim. The paper also argues that Lewis’s (1975) attack on material implication analyses of conditional sentences based on examples where the conditional is embedded under the adverbials sometimes and never does not have much force given that the interpretation of such sentences is subject to inferential pragmatic operations in addition to the recovery of theirdenotation.

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In diesem Aufsatz wird für zwei Thesen argumentiert – erstens, dass die Denotate von Nomina generell Individuen und somit vom logisch-semantischen Typ sind, und zweitens, dass Artikeln die Funktion zukommt, pragmatische Inferenzen über die (Nicht-)Identifizierbarkeit der Referenten von Nomina bzw. nominalen Phrasen zu restringieren. Die Ausführungen zur ersten These richten sich gegen die weitverbreiteten alternativen Auffassungen, dass Nomina der prädikative Typ zugeordnet werden muss bzw. dass der Typ von Nomina je nach Sprache entweder oder sein kann. Der Aufsatz zeigt in Ansätzen auf, wie diese These kompositional-semantisch umgesetzt werden kann. Darüber hinaus wird dargelegt, wie die Interpretation von Nomina gemäß der ersten These mit der Interpretation der Artikel gemäß der zweiten These auf der Basis kompositional-semantischer Annahmen interagiert.