Meaning of ‘now’ and other temporal location adverbs

Abstract

This paper provides an analysis of the temporal location adverb now. The core data comes from free indirect discourse, where now often co-occurs with the past tense and has an affinity for stative sentences. Building on Kamp & Reyle’s (1993) analysis, I propose that now is a perspective setting anaphor: it requires an eventuality described by an aspectual phrase to hold throughout a salient event that serves as a the ‘current perspective.’ The proposed meaning is compatible with both the past and present tenses and it has the same semantic type and uses the same ingredients as other temporal location adverbs.