'em X tempo' and 'por X tempo' in the temporal-aspectual domain

Abstract

This paper presents an analysis of the temporal adjuncts ‘por X tempo’ (for X time) and ‘in X tempo’ (in X time) that does not taken them to select types of predicate. Rothstein’s approach (2004) exemplifies this last perspective, which considers the adjuncts to be strictly correlated to the notions of homo and heterogeneous predicates. We show that her approach cannot account for all the possible uses of these adjuncts and that it gives rise to wrong predictions. According to our analysis, ‘em X tempo’ (in X time) presupposes that the event to which it applies has a telos, whereas ‘por X tempo’ (for X time) introduces a point of reference/focalization related to the event to which it applies. Our proposal explains all the uses of these adjuncts, and it may naturally be extended to future tenses and incremental predicates.