EXPECTATIONS IN SPANISH AND GERMAN ADVERBS OF CHANGE

An analysis of Spanish todavía, ya and German noch, schon (cf. English still, already) in relation to negation is proposed in which expectations and not only time enter the picture. Used with wide scope, these adverbs apply to descriptions of changes that do or do not take place; it is this change of a given state of affairs that is central to their meaning, which is made up of a presupposition and an expectation. A unified analysis is offered that covers a variety of uses, such äs evaluative, epistemic, quantitative, and temporal with narrow scope (including German erst and Spanish solo; cf. English only). The conflicting analyses of the different uses are discarded in favor of a semantic definition procedure where differences are accounted for by appropriate semantic operators. A claim to include in the semantics of the adverbs the components previously considered pragmatic is thus substantiated, since expectations are well-defined linguistic objects, and not the result of inferences of any sort. At the same time, in the semantic definitions of the adverbs a place is secured for inferential access to knowledge used in utterance Interpretation. © 1992, Walter de Gruyter. All rights reserved.