A unified semantics for two temporal paradoxes

Abstract

This paper discusses two naturally occurring temporal paradoxes, temporal metalepsis and time travel discourse, and argues that they can be predicted by the following hypothesis: events are not restricted to a single temporal location, and can be felicitously asserted to occur at different times. I further show that this hypothesis is independently motivated by the grammar, and claim that it is a natural extension of fundamental principles of event semantics: the treatment of events as paralleling prototypically spatial individuals.