Semantics of the temporal adjunct construction and time congruency

Resumen

The following paper deals with the grammatical construction of the temporal adverbs yesterday, today and tomorrow, highlighting their semantic characteristics. For this, and following the Construction Grammar framework developed by Fillmore, I revise critically the grammatical construction proposed by this author for the previous temporal adverbs. Sustaining this semantic description on the cognitive notions of target and landmark, the adjuncts yesterday, today and tomorrow are explained in relation to the Calendar Unit of day, where the adverbs precede, equal or follow the reference time or landmark. Nevertheless, Fillmore's approach turns out to be incomplete, since it is only concerned with the inherent semantic features of these time adjuncts. Consequently, another section is devoted to some characteristics of the interaction between time adverbs and the other elements of the clause, this time resting on the semantic notion of Time Congruency, which will yield significant syntactic consequences