This paper investigates the semantics of be going to, starting from a schematic definition which interprets temporal meanings in terms of referential and epistemological attributes. The analysis is framed within the model of cognitive grammar, taking deictic syntactical constructions as instances of grounding predications and differences between them as triggered by aspects of construal and profiling. On the basis of corpus material from American and British English texts, it is concluded that be going to features a paradoxical but pragmatically plausible interpretation of the future as non-given yet present, with a pending event's being signaled or announced at the time of speaking.

This article explores the interface between the syntactic and semantic representation of natural language with respect to the interpretation of time. The main claim of the paper is that the semantic relationship of temporal dependency requires syntactic locality at LF. Based on this claim, I explore the syntax and semantics of gerundive relative clauses. I argue that since gerundive relatives are temporally dependent on the tense of the main clause, they need to be local with a temporal element of the main clause at LF. I show that gerundive relatives receive different temporal interpretations depending on their syntactic position at LF. This analysis sheds light on the behavior of gerundive relatives in constructions involving coordination, existential there, scope of quantificational and cardinality adverbials, extraposition, presuppositionality effects and binding-theoretic reconstruction effects.

In this paper, I consider the semantics of a modifier infinitive in English, related to the more widely discussed Rationale Clause (see especially Faraci 1974, Jones 1991). I argue that the semantics of this infinitive (a Telic Clause) derives from the properties of the predicate which heads it (TELOS). I characterize TELOS, within a Davidsonian event semantics, as a pure relation between events and argue against the view that the word only, which often prefaces the Telic Clause, is in fact the head of the construction. I explore the conditions on reference which apply to TELOS. As well as offering an account of a little-discussed construction, therefore, this paper is intended as a contribution to our understanding of the place of argument structure in event semantics.

Cahill & Gazdar (henceforth C&G) have presented their analysis of German noun inflection in issue 35.1 (1999) of this journal. As they emphasize (on page 4), the lexical knowledge representation language DATR they employ is theoretically neutral and can serve to encode descriptions set in entirely diverse theoretical frameworks, not just those that are theoretically close to theirs. The formalism is just as amenable to ‘item and process’ and ‘word and paradigm’ analyses as it is to the affixal ‘item and arrangement’ perspective. Moreover, distinct DATR theories (i.e., concrete descriptions) may differ greatly in their input (queries) and output (returned values) while they share a common structure reflecting the inheritance relations arising from the described phenomena.

In this paper I will present another analysis of German noun inflection, encoded in the same formalism but based on the theory of MINIMALIST MORPHOLOGY developed by Wunderlich and his associates (Wunderlich & Fabri 1995, Wunderlich 1997a, 1999b). In his account German nouns are mapped into tree-based representations of their inflectional paradigms, whereas C&G map tuples of lexemes and inflectional categories (case and number) into individual inflected word forms. The major linguistic gain of my analysis is that the principal strength of Wunderlich's account, the formal description of relations within paradigms, is combined with the formal description of hierarchical relations BETWEEN paradigms, which is central for C&G but given little attention by Wunderlich.

Farrell Ackerman & Gert Webelhuth,A theory of predicates (CSLI Lecture Notes 76). Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications, 1998. Pp. xiv+402.

Peter W. Culicover, Syntactic nuts: hard cases, syntactic theory, and language acquisition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Pp. viii + 244.