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ASPECTUAL UNIVERSALS OF TEMPORAL ANAPHORA
Maria Bittner Monday, March 13, 11:30 AM MJH Rm 126 Sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center/Mellon Foundation Graduate Research Program Since Kamp and Rohrer 1983 and Partee 1984 it has been known that temporal anaphora in French and English depends on aspect. Events and states are located differently in relation to the reference time, which I take to be the topic time of Klein 1994. Events fall within, while states hold throughout, the topic time. Aspect also affects temporal update. If the update is done by an event verb, then the new topic time is the period of the result state (Webber 1988); if it is done by a state verb, the new topic is the period of the state itself. This paper extends these generalizations along three dimensions. The resulting theory of temporal anaphora extends from languages with grammatical tense systems, such as English and French, to grammatically tenseless languages, such as Kalaallisut (Bittner 2005a), Yukatek Maya (Bohnemeyer 2002), and Mohawk (Baker and Travis 1997). Secondly, the proposed theory covers new temporal phenomena, including aspect-based defaults and presuppositions. And thirdly, it extends to new aspectual types, processes and habits, which support anaphora to proper parts (stages and instances, respectively). 
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