The grammar of the english verb phrase part 93 pot

This Adv-time is interpreted as punctual if the time of the full situation of thewhen-clause is punctual as in John arrived when I left and as durative if the time of the full situation

I Introduction

13.1 Delineation of the subject

Adverbialwhen-clauses specify an Adv-time Semantically and diachronically, they are

‘headless’ relative clauses, i e relative clauses whose relative pronoun ‘contains’ a co-vert antecedent In the same way as what he wanted means ‘that which he wanted’, when he came means ‘then when he came’, which is equivalent to ‘at the time at which

he came’

‘Narrative’when-clauses, which do not specify the time of the head clause situation

but ‘push forward’ the action (e g I had just gone to bed when the phone rang) are

not adverbialwhen-clauses and will therefore be disregarded.

13.1.1 When-clauses can be used in various ways (e g relative clauses, object

clauses, adverbial clauses) In this chapter we will only be concerned with

adverbial when-clauses Like any other time-specifying adverbial, an adverbial

when-clause specifies an Adv-time This Adv-time is interpreted as punctual if

the time of the full situation of thewhen-clause is punctual (as in John arrived

when I left) and as durative if the time of the full situation of the when-clause

is durative (as inJohn arrived when I was in my study).

Adverbial when-clauses deserve investigating in this book on tense for

sev-eral reasons They present one of the rare cases in which the tense form of the

subclause is bound by a time of orientation other than the situation time of

the head clause This follows from the temporal structure of when, which, as

we will see, means ‘at the time at which’ Moreover, a combination of a head

clause and a when-clause realizes one of at least nine possible configurations

of temporal relations When-clauses allow a special type of ‘indirect binding’

and also allow other tense choices which cannot be found in most other types

of subclause In sum, they are interesting to the use of tenses in many respects

13.1.2 Semantically and diachronically,when-clauses areheadless relative

clauses(orfree relative clauses), i e relative clauses whose relative pronoun

‘contains’ a covert antecedent In the same way aswhat he wanted means ‘that

which he wanted’,when he came means ‘then when he came’, which is equivalent

to ‘at the time at which he came’ The only difference is that ‘that which he

wanted’ is an NP, while ‘at the time at which he came’ is a prepositional phrase

functioning as a temporal adverbial In other words, in the same way aswhat he

wanted is commonly called a ‘nominal relative clause’, when he came can be

re-ferred to as an ‘adverbial relative clause’, at least as far as its syntactic function is

concerned As will be explained in more detail in 13.3,when has the internal

tem-638 13 Adverbialwhen-clauses and the use of tenses

poral structure ‘at the time at which’, in which ‘which’ represents an implicit ori-entation time which binds the situation time of thewhen-clause (This explains,

among other things, why adverbialwhen-clauses referring to the post-present use

the ‘Pseudo-t0-System’ rather than the ‘Absolute Future System’⫺ see 10.1⫺2.) For a good understanding of this chapter it is very important to keep this starting-point in mind: adverbial when-clauses are really restrictive relative

clauses depending on a prepositional phrase (‘at the time’) or adverb (‘then’) functioning as Adv-time

13.1.3 A type ofwhen-clause which is perhaps not always easy to distinguish

from the adverbial type is the ‘narrativewhen-clause’, examples of which are to be found in the following sentences:

She had just picked up the revolver when movementcaught her eyes (www)

Yesterday evening I was sitting in the living-room, watching TV, when suddenly a policemancame in.

I was just having a chat with the vicar when hewas called away.

We had hardly sat down to rest when the darknessfell upon us (www)

Scarcely will the farmer finish ploughing when the seed planted will be ripe for

harvest (www)

I know Tom Hardly will he have left the country when hewill already regret his decision.

In examples like these it is the head clause situation that functions as time indication for the when-clause situation, rather than the other way round In

other words, the when-clause does not specify the time of the head clause

situation but ‘pushes forward’ the action This means that such a narrative

when-clause does not create an Adv-time but establishes a temporal domain of

its own This explains why it uses an absolute tense form (e g a form from the Absolute Future System, as in the last two examples)

Since narrative when-clauses are not adverbial when-clauses (i e clauses

indicating an Adv-time), we will disregard them in this chapter.1

orientation-time adverbials

Thewhen-clause can specify either the situation time of the head clause or an

orienta-tion time which binds the situaorienta-tion time of the head clause in terms of T-anteriority or T-posteriority In other words, thewhen-clause can be used either as a situation-time

1 For a full treatment of narrativewhen-clauses, see Declerck (1997: 212⫺229).

adverbial or as an orientation-time adverbial In both cases the time specified (con-tained) by the Adv-time will be called the ‘contained orientation time’

13.2.1 It was noted in 2.24⫺5 that a time-specifying adverbial can function

either as a ‘situation-time adverbial’ or as an ‘orientation-time

adver-bial’ In the former case the Adv-time ‘contains’ (in terms of inclusion or

coincidence) the situation time of the clause involving the time-specifying

ad-verbial, as in John left yesterday or John left at five We speak of an

‘orienta-tion-time adverbial’ when the orientation time which the Adv-time contains is

not the situation time but another orientation time in the tense structure of the

clause, as in At five o’clock John had already left the office (In this example

the Adv-time contains the orientation time to which the situation time is

T-anterior).2 The relation ‘Adv-time contains situation time’ can be represented

in the ways shown in Figure 13.1 The temporal structure of At five o’clock

John had already left the office, in which the ‘contained orientation time’ (see

13.2.2) is not a situation time, can be represented as in Figure 13.2

OR x

x

Figure 13.1 Representations of ‘Adv-time contains situation time’.

The conventions used in these figures and in the others that will be given below

are as follows An orientation time is represented by an x, irrespective of

whether it is a situation time or not, and regardless of whether it is punctual

or durative The Adv-time is represented as in Figure 13.1, again irrespective

of whether it is punctual or durative This means that the representations in

Figure 13.1 in fact cover four possibilities: (a) durative Adv-time including

punctual situation time (e g.John left yesterday); (b) durative Adv-time

includ-ing durative situation time (e g.I wrote that letter yesterday); (c) durative

Adv-time coinciding with durative situation Adv-time (e g Yesterday I was in London

2 In some cases the Adv-time contains both the orientation time to which the situation

time of the head clause is related and the situation time of the head clause itself This is

true, for example, of the Adv-time established byyesterday in Yesterday John had

al-ready left the office at four o’clock For the sake of simplicity, such

‘multiple-orientation-time adverbials’ (see 2.26) will be disregarded here.

640 13 Adverbialwhen-clauses and the use of tenses

Adv-time

x

x

situation time

Figure 13.2 The temporal structure of At five o’clock John had already left the office.

all day); and (d) punctual Adv-time coinciding with punctual situation time.

(e g.John left at five).

13.2.2 For ease of reference we will call the orientation time that is specified

by an Adv-time the ‘contained orientation time’ As explained in the previ-ous section, the contained orientation time in the tense structure of the head clause is the situation time (of the head clause) if the when-clause is used as a

situation-time adverbial and is another orientation time (binding the situation time of the head clause) if thewhen-clause functions as an orientation-time

ad-verbial

13.2.3 The following is an overview of some terms and meanings:

Adv-time: time specified by an adverbial Contained orientation time: orientation time contained in the Adv-time, in

terms of inclusion or coincidence

Situation-time adverbial: adverbial specifying an Adv-time whose contained

orientation time is a situation time

Orientation-time adverbial: adverbial specifying an Adv-time whose

con-tained orientation time is not a situation time but another (in this case

‘implicit’ ⫺ see 2.14) orientation time which binds a situation time

II The temporal structure of adverbial

when-clauses

The temporal structure expressed by when is that of a ‘common Adv-time’ containing

both an orientation time from the tense structure of the head clause (the ‘contained orientation time of the head clause’) and an orientation time from the tense structure

of thewhen-clause (the ‘contained orientation time of the when-clause’) This temporal

structure, which is the semantics of when, can therefore be paraphrased as ‘at a/the

time at which’

13.3.1 Adverbialwhen-clauses differ from nonclausal time-specifying

adver-bials likeyesterday or some time earlier in that they do not name an Adv-time

directly but relate two orientation times (viz the situation time of the

when-clause and the contained orientation time) to each other However, in doing so

adverbial when-clauses do establish an Adv-time, and they therefore function

either as situation-time adverbials or as orientation-time adverbials:

I left when John arrived (when-clause as situation-time adverbial: the contained

orientation time of the head clause is the situation time of the head clause)

When John arrived, I had already left.(when-clause as orientation-time adverbial:

the situation time of the head clause is T-anterior to the contained orientation time)

I had left when John arrived (The sentence is ambiguous because the when-clause

may be either an orientation-time adverbial ⫺ yielding the reading ‘When John

ar-rived I had already left’ ⫺ and a situation-time adverbial ⫺ as in I was no longer

there at four because I had left at the same time as John arrived, which was at three.)

The temporal structure of such sentences is determined both by the tense forms

and by the semantics ofwhen As we have seen, when can be paraphrased ‘at

a/the time at which’ This follows from the fact that, althoughwhen is usually

treated as a temporal conjunction, it is really a free (headless) relative adverb

(see 13.1.2) In the same way aswhat in I know what I like means ‘that which’,

when is semantically equivalent to ‘then when’ (with then as a cataphoric

pro-nominal adverb depending for its interpretation on the modifying

when-clause) It follows that a sentence like (1a) receives the same interpretation

as (1b):

(1a) John left when Bill arrived

(1b) John left at the time when Bill arrived

642 13 Adverbialwhen-clauses and the use of tenses

The temporal structure of (1b) is fairly transparent At the time when Bill arrived establishes an Adv-time which contains the situation time of the head

clause (⫽ the time of John’s leaving) In the relative clause when Bill arrived,

the relative when is a relative adverb and therefore also establishes an

Adv-time, which ‘contains’ an orientation time from the tense structure of the rela-tive clause In this example, the contained orientation time of thewhen-clause

is an implicit orientation time to which the situation time of the relative clause

is T-simultaneous This means that there are two Adv-times in the sentence:

‘[at the time] when Bill arrived’ functions as Adv-time in the head clause, and

when functions as Adv-time in the relative clause Since one of the functions

of a relative is to express coreferentiality between the antecedent and the

wh-constituent of the relative clause, when identifies the two Adv-times with one

another Because (1a) [John left when Bill arrived] differs from (1b) only in that

the antecedent is not overtly expressed but incorporated into the free (headless) relative,when has exactly the same function in (1a) as it has in (1b): it identifies

the Adv-time of the head clause with the Adv-time of the when-clause The

result is that the meaning of (1a) can be paraphrased as follows: ‘There is a time in the past at which Bill arrived, and that time is the time at which John left’

Quite similar remarks can be made in connection with (2a), which is inter-preted in the same way as (2b):

(2a) John left when Bill had already arrived

(2b) John left at a time when Bill had (already) arrived

(As shown in Figure 13.3 below,) in (2b), at a time when Bill had already arrived establishes an Adv-time which contains the situation time of the head

clause (⫽ the time of John’s leaving) Let us call this situation time, which is the orientation time that is contained by the Adv-time established by the

when-clause, ‘orientation timei’ In the relative clausewhen Bill had already arrived,

the relativewhen is a relative adverb establishing an Adv-time, which contains

an orientation time from the tense structure of the relative clause In this exam-ple, the contained orientation time is an orientation time to which the situation time of the relative clause is T-anterior Let us refer to this implicit contained orientation time as ‘orientation timeii’ There are, then, two Adv-times in (2b) First, ‘[at the time] when Bill had (already) arrived’ functions as Adv-time in the head clause Let us call this Adv-time1 Second, when functions as

Adv-time in the relative clause Let us call this Adv-Adv-time2 Becausewhen is a

head-less relative and a relative expresses coreferentiality between the antecedent and the wh-constituent of the relative clause, when identifies the two

Adv-times with one another Since (2a) differs from (2b) only in that the antecedent

is not overtly expressed but contained in the free relative,when has exactly the

same function in (2b): it identifies the Adv-time of the head clause with the

Adv-time2of thewhen-clause The result is that the meaning of (2a) [John left

when Bill had already arrived] can be paraphrased as follows: ‘There is a time

in the past at which Bill had already arrived, and that time is the time at which

John left’

13.3.2 The above analysis implies that the following relations form part of

the semantic structure of (2a⫺b):

Adv-time1contains orientation timei(⫽ the situation time of the head clause)

Adv-time2contains orientation timeii

The situation time of thewhen-clause is anterior to orientation timeii

Adv-time1⫽ Adv-time2

This can be represented as in Figure 13.3, in which the two parallel vertical

lines represent the⫽ sign This figure can be further simplified to the

represen-tation given in Figure 13.4 (in which the symbols representing the containment

relation of the Adv-times are fused into one more complex symbol):

head clause situation time

x

Adv-time1

Adv-time2

x

x

when-clause situation time

Figure 13.3 The temporal structure of John left when Bill had already arrived:

repre-sentation 1

head clause situation time

x

common Adv-time

x

x

when-clause situation time

Figure 13.4 The temporal structure of John left when Bill had already arrived:

repre-sentation 2

13.3.3 For ease of reference, a further couple of terms will be introduced We

will speak of the ‘Adv-time of the head clause’ and the ‘Adv-time of the