Climbing up the context — from temporal adverb to discourse particle

While the German expression jetzt ‘now’ is usually a temporal adverb it also has a use as a discourse particle. In its temporal use, jetzt is a temporal indexical that gets its denotation from the utterance context. It does, however, not just refer to the utterance point at which the utterance is made (present reading), but can also refer to a larger time interval that starts in the past and ends at the utterance time point (past reading) or refer to one that starts at the utterance time point and extends into the future (future reading). Crucially, the discourse particle has three corresponding readings that center around a discourse question. This jetzt can relate an utterance back to a previous question (past reading), mark the start of a new question (future reading), or it may also mark a question as still being current (present reading). The discourse use of jetzt thus inherits the three orientations of the temporal use of jetzt and applies them to a higher notion of context: instead of situating the utterance in the time of the physical world, it situates the utterance with respect to other utterances in the linguistic interaction. We provide a formal semantics for temporal and discourse jetzt that can provide all three readings and also highlight the similarities between the two uses.