On the prepositions which introduce an adjunct of duration

Abstract

This paper deals with the prepositions which introduce an adjunct of duration, such as the English for and in. On the basis of both crosslingual and monolingual evidence these adjuncts are argued to be ambiguous between a floating and an anchored interpretation. To capture the distinction in formal terms I employ the framework of HEAD-DRIVEN PHRASE STRUCTURE GRAMMAR, enriched with a number of devices which are familiar from DISCOURSE REPRESENTATION THEORY. The resulting analysis is demonstrated to be relevant for machine translation, natural language generation and natural language understanding.