Temporal dependency and the syntax of subjects

This article explores the interface between the syntactic and semantic repr esentation of natural language with respect to the interpretation of time. The main claim of the paper is that the semantic relationship of temporal d ependency requires syntactic locality at LF. Based on this claim, I explore the syntax and semantics of gerundive relative clauses. I argue that since gerundive relatives are temporally dependent on the tense of the main clau se, they need to be local with a temporal element of the main clause at LF. I show that gerundive relatives receive different temporal interpretations depending on their syntactic position at LF. This analysis sheds light on the behavior of gerundive relatives in constructions involving coordination , existential there, scope of quantificational and cardinality adverbials, extraposition, presuppositionality effects and binding-theoretic reconstruc tion effects.