THE SEMANTICS OF TEMPORAL SUBORDINATE CONJUNCTIONS

Abstract

Several studies have discussed the notion of time in the English Language (Hornstein, 1990 ; Declerck, 1991). In particular, these studies have centered on 'temporal subordinate conjunctions', a particular class of subordinate conjunctions that are used to express events in relation to one another. While these studies have hinted at interplay between the tense, aspect and the temporal subordinate conjunctions, these studies have not attempted to offer a semantics of these temporal subordinate conjunctions. In this thesis, I attempt to address this academic gap by investigating the semantics of temporal subordinate conjunctions, focusing my study on three conjunctions: when, as soon as and while. Through studying the data that I collected from 10 respondents, 1 started by making generalizations about the grammaticality of sentences with respect to tense and aspect of the sentences. Next, by systematically forming semantic representations of tense and aspect independently of the subordinate conjunctions, followed by that of the three subordinate conjunctions themselves, I am able to explain my generalizations using the semantics of tense, aspect and temporal subordinate conjunctions. In doing so, I show that the inherent meaning that these subordinate conjunctions have place constraints on the type of tense and aspect that is allowed in the main and subordinate clauses that occur with it.