The Semantic Basis for Subject/object Asymmetries in English

Abstract

However, there are sentences which show an asymmetry between the temporal location of the subject in the eventuality and other constituents in the sentence, such as Aunt May resembled Sally, where Aunt May is dead and Sally is alive. The state of resembling cannot be contained wholly in the past and exclude the present. In such a situation, neither Sally nor the resembling is located by the tense but only Aunt May. The simplest hypothesis that captures these facts is to stipulate that the tense combines only with the subject and not anything else in the sentence.