Splitting the Reference Time: Temporal Anaphora and Quantification in DRT

Abstract

This paper presents an analysis of temporal anaphora in sentences which contain quantification over events, within the framework of Discourse Representation Theory. The analysis in (Partee 1984) of quantified sentences, introduced by a temporal connective, gives the wrong truth-conditions when the temporal connective in the subordinate clause is "before" or "after". This problem has been previously analyzed in (de Swart 1991) as an instance of the proportion problem, and given a solution from a Generalized Quantifier approach. By using a careful distinction between the different notions of reference time, based on (Kamp and Reyle 1993), we propose a solution to this problem, within the framework of DRT. We show some applications of this solution to additional temporal anaphora phenomena in quantified sentences.