| This dissertation investigates the temporal interpretation of subordinate clauses, aiming to provide a uniform account for the temporal interpretation of both matrix and subordinate clauses in Korean. To this end, I propose a non-deictic analysis of tense in Korean that treats tense as a function denoting a binary temporal relation, not necessarily tied to deiticity, the same way for both matrix and subordinate clauses. I claim that the important element of tense responsible for a deictic or anaphoric interpretation of clauses is a Reference time, a temporal argument of tense, which I treat as a temporal pro in this paper. Thus, the proposed tense system of Korean is simple and neat in that a tense morpheme refers to either an anterior or overlapping relation across the board, maintaining its meaning independent of the context where it appears. Yet, the choice of the antecedent of a temporal pro and the restrictions posed on it determine the temporal interpretation of matrix and subordinate tenses. Therefore, the semantic interpretation of tense heavily relies on what a Reference time of tense can take as its antecedent.;The proposed tense system has advantages in accounting for the phenomena which are otherwise attributed to lexical idiosyncrasies of Korean tense morphemes. The peculiar future time interpretation of a past tense morpheme as well as the so-called historic present tense is well explained in terms of the choice of the temporal antecedent of a Reference time. Under the proposed analysis, the meaning of a past or present tense morpheme remains constant, not adding any idiosyncratic lexical meaning of the given morpheme: the peculiar meanings come from the fact that a context selects a certain (contextually) salient time as the antecedent of a Reference time over a Speech time, which is the default reference time. Also, the proposed analysis, where the deictic versus anterior past tense distinction does not hold anymore, is able to accounts for the temporal meaning of a double form of 'ess-ess-' in terms of its temporal presupposition.;More importantly, turning to the temporal interpretation of subordinate tenses, this dissertation provides a novel account for the long standing issue of the temporal difference between complement and relative clauses. The present analysis reaches the solution by combining Higginbotham's (2002a, 2006) temporal movement analysis along with Giorgi's (2010) theory of indexicality. The main difference between complement c and relative clause tenses is accounted for by the presence/absence of the obligatory movement of a temporal pro to the binding position in Spec of a CP, following Higginbotham (2002a, 2006). The movement is justified when we consider that the speaker's coordinates introduced to every sentence can bind the temporal pro , yielding an indexical interpretation, but the movement to the peripheral position in Spec of a CP gets the temporal pro out of the domain, resulting in an anaphoric interpretation only. In contrast, the movement is optional in relative clauses, resulting in a temporal ambiguity.;Finally, two types of temporal interactions are discussed in this paper. The interaction between tense and temporal adverbials reveals that the restriction on deictic temporal adverbials inside a complement clause is tightly connected to the effect on the choice of a Reference time, given by the modification of temporal adverbs. The other is the interaction between temporal interpretation and pragmatic information. It is shown that Korean does not have a Double Access Reading in a semantic sense, but the alleged double access effect comes from the pragmatic inference available during the temporal interpretation. |
