About determiners on event descriptions, about time being like space (when we talk), and about one particularly strange construction

Abstract

This paper should be read against the backdrop of three lines of linguistic investigation: (1) the investigation of the Perfect construction, which has received considerable attention, going back to Reichenbach (Elements of symbolic logic, 1947); (2) the working hypothesis that certain verbal constructions can be described in terms of the semantics of determiners on nominal expressions, with which we are more familiar; (3) the common observation that we talk about time the way we talk about space. The focus of the paper is a particular construction in Greek. As always, however, the search for the solution of a particular question reveals many other questions in the process and this paper should be seen as being also about a number of related puzzles in English and other languages.