On the compositionality of temporal locating adverbial modification

International audienceSemantic puzzles raised by temporal locating adverbials have been less focused on than those involving temporal quanti cational or duration adverbials. But these adverbials, whose semantics amounts to the location of a single eventuality with respect to a time or another eventuality, are involved in phenomena apparently jeopardizing the compositionality of adverbial modification. In this paper, we focus on French data for which we propose an account in Segmented Discourse Representation Theory. The compositionality issue we are interested in here appears for our approach to locating adverbials, which assumes that the location relation is contributed by the adverbial itself. This is against the standard view which assumes that the adverbial simply qualifies a temporal referent systematically introduced along with the location relation by the tense. Our approach assumes a unique semantics for the adverbials and the tenses, and acknowledges the contribution of IP-level composition in discourse representation construction