Implicit Quantification of Temporal Adverbials

Vague temporal adverbials like soon, recent, just, which are used to locate situations in time, do not set clear boundaries to the time-interval between the reference-point (usually the moment of speech) and the time at which the situation referred to occurs. In the context of particular sentences these vague adverbials receive an interpretation that restricts the length of the time-interval to a more limited range of values (of. John has just smoked a cigaret and John has just married). In two experiments the contextual interpretation of vague temporal adverbials was investigated by means of quantification judgments whereby subjects had to provide numerical estimates for the time-interval. The frequency and the duration of everyday human acts expressed by the verbal phrases of sentences were systematically varied and were shown to have an effect on the assumed length of the time-interval. Larger estimates were obtained when adverbials were combined with verbal phrases that expressed infrequent acts and acts with longer duration. In a final section some theoretical implications of the experimental results are presented.