doi:10.1093/jos/ffu005 On the Temporal Interpretation of Present

The goal of this article is to investigate the temporal properties of German present participles, occurring prenominally and in secondary predication, in an event semantic approach. Empirically, the study relies in part on the corpus-based descriptions of pre-nominal participles presented in Lübbe & Rapp (2011). I will argue that—according to Keshet’s (2008) Intersective Predicate Generalization—present participles are always tem-porally dependent on their sister constituent. If they occur in secondary predication, this sister constituent is the main clause VP; if they occur prenominally, it is the modified noun. The temporal relation with the noun / the main clause predicate is simultaneity (cf. Kusumoto 1999, 2005), but this simultaneity relation can be altered by temporal adverbials like gestern ‘yesterday ’ and früher ‘formerly’. The article will also consider whether there is a grammatically determined temporal relation between a prenominal present participle and the main clause. I will argue that prenominal present participles are dependent on the main clause predicate only if the participle is embedded in a DP with a non-presuppositional ( = indefinite) determiner. Non