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<Paper uid="W01-1304">
  <Title>Directional PPs and Reference Frames in DRT</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> A great deal of energy has been spent on the semantic analysis of temporal relations within a sentence and beyond that, between sentences.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Crucially, it has been a well-established and intensively studied fact that eventualities (or events) are interpreted within a temporal framework, i.e. a temporal reference frame with respect to which the temporal relations which obtain between those events are interpreted (e.g.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Reichenbach 1947, Kamp &amp; Reyle 1993). For instance, a past tense verb tends, in the absence of any other external clue, to be temporally interpreted with respect to the time of utterance.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> That is to say that a typical semantic contribution of a simple past is assessed on a two-dimensional frame centred on the time of utterance, as is the case in sentence (1), where the past tense is understood as encoding a precedence relation between the event described by the sentence and the time of utterance n.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> (1) Alice took a walk by the river.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> Notice that this is not always the case. In a larger discursive context, a speaker can control some of these parameters, for instance by embedding a simple past within a larger narrative sequence. In this configuration, a simple past is then often interpreted as following the time denoted by the preceding simple past. So, that if we insert (1) within a larger discursive environment, the past tense of took gets interpreted in a different way: (2) Alice slept in that morning. After a hefty breakfast, she needed some exercise. She [Alice] took a walk by the river.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> Although it is still the case that the action described by sentence (1) is located at a time t which precedes n, the whole context of (2) adds a further constraint to the interpretation of the past tense in took as it implies a narrative sequence by virtue of which, t has to follow - in the temporal dimension - t', the time at which Alice had her breakfast.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="7"> In contrast, similar facts in the spatial domain have been barely touched upon by the semanticists' community. In particular, although the existence of spatial reference frames has been ascertained again and again, very little has been done in order to show how, e.g. spatial adverbs or spatial prepositional expressions interact with a spatial framework in order to yield a given meaning. Part of the failure to come up with a satisfactory account can be explained by the relative difficulty to tell the semantic from the pragmatic contributions. It is the goal of this paper to present a formalism that addresses these issues and tries to draw a line between what is encoded and what is contextually derived. In order to do so, I will focus on a set of framework-sensitive PPs, namely directional (or projective) PPs: to the left/right of, in front of / behind, above /below and cardinal directions.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="8"> Researchers (see for instance Levinson 1996) have shown that human languages make use of only - and up to - three universal reference frames in order to express spatial relations. All three of them are instantiated in Indo-European languages. Thus, a single spatial configuration can be expressed in three different ways in these languages, depending on which reference frame is activated. All three examples below are to be interpreted as referring to a unique spatial setting. null  (3) Le chat est a l'est de la voiture (4) the cat is east of the car ABSOLUTE FRAMEWORK (5) Le chat est derriere la voiture [with respect to the car] (6) the cat is behind the car INTRINSIC FRAMEWORK (7) Le chat est a droite de la voiture [with respect to the speaker's viewpoint] (8) the cat is on the right of the car</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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