Aaron, Tom and Valentine open SALT at Stanford
May 15,
SALT 25 opens with "
On double access, cessation and parentheticality," work that
Aaron Steven White,
Tom Roberts and
Valentine Hacquard have done with
Daniel Altschuler from HHU Düsseldorf. The paper concerns the 'double access' reading of sentences like "John said that Mary is pregnant," on which the embedded present tense is taken to refer to the time of speech. Building on corpus data, it shows that this usage is well-attested, and that its seeming marginality is due to an interaction between a 'parenthetical' use of the speech or attitude report – on which it offers evidence for the speaker's weak endorsement of the proposition expressed by the embedded clause – and the 'cessation' implicature sometimes triggered by past tense.
