[Mus95]: On the Temporal Interpretation of Noun Phrases #
Musan's dissertation establishes the lifetime effects diagnostic: past tense with individual-level predicates implicates that the subject no longer exists. The diagnostic minimal pair, ex (2a)/(2b) p. 11:
- (2a) Gregory was silent — stage-level predicate (
silent); no lifetime implicature. - (2b) Gregory was from America — individual-level predicate (
from America); implicates Gregory is dead.
The implicature is not part of the truth conditions but a strong inference arising from past tense + individual-level predicate composition. Central to Musan's argument that NP temporal interpretation depends on the predicate's lexical aspect.
Schema gap #
The lifetime-effects implicature is not captured by ReichenbachFrame
— the frame can encode past-tense locating (R < P), but the
stage-level/individual-level distinction and the pragmatic inference live
in a separate dimension (lexical aspect of the predicate + Gricean reasoning
over past-tense felicity). The empirical data is anchored in the
LinguisticExample JSON; no Reichenbach frame is provided here, since the
relevant content isn't reducible to S/P/R/E.
See feedback_reichenbach_morph_vs_interp_conflation.md for the broader
pattern: many tense-related phenomena are not faithfully modeled by
Reichenbach frames alone.