Punctual time adverbials in Italian

Abstract

In past and future perfect sentences, punctual time adverbials like at five o’clock can specify either the Event Time or the Reference Time. In Italian, their interpretation is affected by syntactic position: a clause-peripheral adverbial allows for both interpretations, while a clause-internal adverbial only has the E-interpretation. Moreover, for clause-peripheral adverbials the presence of the adverb già (already) blocks the E-interpretation. It is shown that this pattern can be accounted for under a smuggling analysis, in which (i) the adverbial is merged as a DP in a functional projection intervening between T and the subject in the edge of v/VP, thus blocking Agree between them; (ii) smuggling of v/VP past the adverbial solves the intervention effect; and (iii) an E-adverbial originates in a projection below già (already), while an R-adverbial originates in a projection above it. A compositional semantic analysis is provided for the proposed syntactic structure.