Situated temporal reference: A case for compositional pragmatics?

The paper proposes an analysis of temporal reference in discourse which assumes situated acts of communication and their abstract equivalents (pragmemes, Mey, 2001, 2007) and suggest a formal compositional account of acts of communication in the framework of Default Semantics (DS, Jaszczolt, 2005, 2009, 2010). DS models abstract, situated acts of communication but in addition offers semantic, truth-conditional representations of situated meanings, in that, in accordance with the principles of contextualism, truth-conditional representations allow for the contribution of the output of pragmatic processing. This approach is then exemplified in the representation of temporality.