On Time Adverbials

The aim of this article is to propose a principled syntactic implementation of the idea, which has been successfully developed in the most recent semantic literature, that temporal connectives such as the conjunctions after, before, etc. express relations among sets of events. This insight, according to which the two clauses connected by the temporal connective are independent of each other, is hard to reconcile with the familiar analyses of temporal clauses in terms of complements of the main verb or (VP-)adjuncts, which are bound to encode some form of syntactic dependency between the main and the subordinate clause. The analysis put forward here, based on Kayne's Antisymmetry Theory, assumes that temporal conjunctions are generated as designated heads in the left periphery of the clause, and give rise to predication structures by means of (overt) movement of the main clause to the Spec of this designated position. The different options concerning surface word order between main clause and subordinate temporal clause are derived by the interaction of syntactic structure (especially the hypothesis that the left periphery hosts distinct Topic and Focus projections) and the interface conditions governing stress/focus assignment. The approach proposed here is free of the contradictions detected in the competing analyses and more sensitive to the interface requirements.