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The Interpretation of Tense: “I Didn't Turn Off the Stove”
Abstract
This chapter examines Partee's celebrated claim that tenses are not existential quantifiers but pronouns. In the first half of the chapter, we show that this proposal successfully accounts for the behavior of tense morphemes regarding deixis, anaphora, and presupposition. It is also compatible with cases where tense morphemes behave like bound variables. In the second half of the chapter, we turn to the syntax–semantics interface and propose some concrete implementations based on three different assumptions about the semantics of tense: (i) quantificational; (ii) pronominal; (iii) relational. Finally, we touch on some tense‐related issues involving temporal adverbials and crosslinguistic differences.
... While the specifics of the lexical semantics of tense may differ, on all approaches tense introduces in the logical form a time interval in relation to the evaluation time. For an overview of tense semantics, seeOgihara and Sharvit (2012),Ogihara and Kusumoto (2020), Sharvit (2020), a.o. 8 Corresponding to our use of 'reference time' are the terms 'topic time'(Klein, 1994) or 'assertion time'(Demirdache & Uribe-Etxebarria, 2000).9 ...
Paraguayan Guarani does not overtly mark tense in its inflectional system. Prior accounts of languages without obligatory morphological tense have posited a phonologically covert lexical tense, or have introduced tense semantics via a rule, in the post-syntactic interpretative component. We offer a more radical approach: Paraguayan Guarani does not have tense at the level of lexical or logical semantics. We propose that evaluation time shift, a mechanism independently attested in the narrative present in languages with tense, is more widely used in Paraguayan Guarani for encoding temporal meaning. The broader consequence of our proposal is that tense is not a linguistic universal.
... Les temps verbaux du français peuvent être considérés comme des réflexes morphologiques (flexionnels) de l'instruction sur la localisation temporelle d'un moment (ou intervalle temporel) t, par rapport au moment de la parole (que nous désignerons t0). À l'interface syntaxe-sémantique, l'instruction temporelle évoquée provient de ce qu'on appelle les temps sémantiques (« semantic tenses ») (Stechov, 1995 : 368 ;Ogihara−Kusumoto, 2020), qu'on désignera PRÉS, PASSÉ, FUT. En effet, chaque temps verbal se voit assigner un temps sémantique qui, au niveau de l'interprétation, introduit un moment (ou intervalle) t et met en rapport t et t0 : PRÉS: t0t, PASSÉ: tt0 et FUT: tt0. ...
En nous servant d’outils de la sémantique formelle, nous examinons des interactions entre l’aspect grammatical et le mode d’action dans le processus de la construction du sens aspectuel de la phrase en français. Si la notion de temps topical de Klein sert de lien entre l’information temporelle et l’information aspectuelle véhiculées par des morphèmes temporels, elle nous permet également de comprendre pourquoi on doit postuler, dans certains cas, la transformation aspectuelle du procès.
A pronominal analysis of tense goes back to Partee (1973), motivated by a series of proposed parallels between the interpretation of tenses and that of pronouns. This article revisits Partee's interpretive parallels, as well as two more identified in Kratzer (1998), in light of subsequent developments in work on both temporal relations and on pronouns. The goal of this article is not to argue for or against a pronominal analysis of tense, but instead to make clearer the syntactic and semantic space within which such an analysis is situated, especially given that pronouns have been given increasingly complex syntactic representations even as tense has remained syntactically simplex.
Pages 1 to 8 of this article are a somewhat expanded version of my introduction to the round table. The remainder is (with minimal changes) the brief text that was sent in advance to the participants of the round table on which this volume is based.
In this article I present an outline of a theory of phrase structure that incorporates a series of functional projections forming the basis for the interpretation of tense. Most previous theories of tense have relied on an idiosyncratic set of semantic rules to account for the distribution and interpretation of particular tense forms. The theory that I develop here seeks to derive most of the semantics of tense from independently motivated principles of syntactic theory. To this end, I introduce a minimum of new theoretical machinery, though a more complex syntactic structure is required, involving an additional functional projection dominating the verb phrase and various phonetically null elements. In this respect, the theory is in the spirit of work in the Principles and Parameters framework associated with the interpretation of argument structure, thematic roles, and pronominal reference.
In this book we hope to acquaint the reader with the fundamentals of truth conditional model-theoretic semantics, and in particular with a version of this developed by Richard Montague in a series of papers published during the 1960's and early 1970's. In many ways the paper 'The Proper Treatment of Quantification in Ordinary English' (commonly abbreviated PTQ) represents the culmination of Montague's efforts to apply the techniques developed within mathematical logic to the semantics of natural languages, and indeed it is the system outlined there that people generally have in mind when they refer to "Montague Grammar". (We prefer the term "Montague Semantics" inasmuch as a grammar, as conceived of in current linguistics, would contain at least a phonological component, a morphological component, and other subsystems which are either lacking entirely or present only in a very rudi mentary state in the PTQ system. ) Montague's work has attracted increasing attention in recent years among linguists and philosophers since it offers the hope that semantics can be characterized with the same formal rigor and explicitness that transformational approaches have brought to syntax. Whether this hope can be fully realized remains to be seen, but it is clear nonetheless that Montague semantics has already established itself as a productive para digm, leading to new areas of inquiry and suggesting new ways of conceiving of theories of natural language. Unfortunately, Montague's papers are tersely written and very difficult to follow unless one has a considerable background in logical semantics.
List of abbreviations. Preface. 1. Introduction. 2. Tense and temporal adverbials in simple sentences. 3. Previous analyses of tenses in embedded clauses. 4. Sequence-of-tense phenomena in complement clauses. 5. Sequence-of-tense phenomena in adjunct clauses. 6. Tense and de re attitudes. Appendix: The syntax and semantics of tenses in English and Japanese. References. Index.
This thesis investigates temporal and aspectual reference in the typologically unrelated African languages Hausa (Chadic, Afro–Asiatic) and Medumba (Grassfields Bantu).
It argues that Hausa is a genuinely tenseless language and compares the interpretation of temporally unmarked sentences in Hausa to that of morphologically tenseless sentences in Medumba, where tense marking is optional and graded.
The empirical behavior of the optional temporal morphemes in Medumba motivates an analysis as existential quantifiers over times and thus provides new evidence suggesting that languages vary in whether their (past) tense is pronominal or quantificational (see also Sharvit 2014).
The thesis proposes for both Hausa and Medumba that the alleged future tense marker is a modal element that obligatorily combines with a prospective future shifter (which is covert in Medumba). Cross-linguistic variation in whether or not a future marker is compatible with non-future interpretation is proposed to be predictable from the aspectual architecture of the given language.
This chapter presents a portrait of a language that arguably lacks absolute
(i.e., deictic) and relative (i.e., anaphoric) tenses and temporal connectives
with meanings comparable to those of English after, before, until, and while.
The language is Yucatec Maya. “Tenselessness”, the absence of tenses
from the grammar of a language, has been documented for a number of
languages. Yucatec goes beyond tenselessness in its simultaneous lack of
temporal connectives of the indicated kind. However, the emphasis in this
chapter is on tenselessness and on the question how Yucatec speakers manage
to communicate about time in the face of it.
Languages that are classified as non-Sequence-of-Tense come in more than one variety (e.g., Arregui & Kusumoto 1998): some
of these languages allow a past tense in before-clauses while others do not. We propose that some languages have quantificational (existential) tenses, while others have
pronominal (referential/bound) tenses. The past tense in before-clauses is ill-formed in a language that has quantificational tenses, because the semantics of before is incompatible with existential quantification over times. A language with pronominal tenses does not have this problem.
The pronominal/quantificational tense distinction interacts with the Sequence-of-Tense parameter, providing a general theory
of possible and impossible languages.
Tense, the grammaticalized marking of location in time, has played a central role in analyses of temporal reference even since before the inception of the formal study of meaning. However, research on a wide range of typologically diverse languages over the past 40 years has revealed that many languages do not have tenses and that there are a variety of other means, both linguistic and contextual, that affect temporal reference besides tense. These empirical findings refute the universality of tense and have significant implications for the role of tense in theoretical analyses of temporal reference. This review catalogues the means that affect temporal reference across tensed and tenseless languages, and offers a theoretical perspective on temporal reference that deemphasizes the centrality of tense.
This paper provides a formal analysis of the grammatical encoding of temporal information in Hausa (Chadic, Afro-Asiatic), thereby contributing to the recent debate on temporality in languages without overt tense morphology. By testing the hypothesis of covert tense against recently obtained empirical data, the study yields the result that Hausa is tenseless and that temporal reference is pragmatically inferred from aspectual, modal and contextual information. The second part of the paper addresses the coding of future in particular. It is shown that future time reference in Hausa is realized as a combination of a modal operator and a Prospective aspect marker, involving the modal meaning components of intention and prediction as well as event time shifting. The discussion relates directly to recent approaches to other seemingly tenseless languages such as St’át’imcets (Matthewson, Linguist Philos 29:673–713, 2006) or Paraguayan Guaraní (Tonhauser, Linguist Philos 34:257–303, 2011b) and provides further evidence for the suggested analyses of the future markers in these languages.
This paper contributes data from Paraguayan Guaraní (Tupí-Guaraní) to the discussion of how temporal reference is determined in tenseless languages. The empirical focus of this study is on finite clauses headed by verbs inflected only for person/number information, which are compatible only with non-future temporal reference in most matrix clause contexts. The paper first explores the possibility of accounting for the temporal reference of such clauses with a phonologically empty non-future tense morpheme, along the lines of Matthewson’s (Linguist Philos 29:673–713, 2006) analysis of a similar phenomenon in St’át’imcets (Salish). This analysis is then contrasted with one according to which temporal reference is not constrained by tense in Paraguayan Guaraní, but only by context and temporal adverbials. A comparison of the two analyses, both of which are couched in a dynamic semantic framework, suggests empirical and theoretical advantages of the tenseless analysis over the tensed one. The paper concludes with a discussion of cross-linguistic variation of temporal reference in tensed and tenseless languages.
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This paper contributes to the debate about ‘tenseless languages’ by defending a tensed analysis of a superficially tenseless
language. The language investigated is St’át’imcets (Lillooet Salish). I argue that although St’át’imcets lacks overt tense
morphology, every finite clause in the language possesses a phonologically covert tense morpheme; this tense morpheme restricts
the reference time to being non-future. Future interpretations, as well as ‘past future’ would-readings, are obtained by the combination of covert tense with an operator analogous to Abusch’s (1985) WOLL. I offer St’át’imcets-internal
evidence (of a kind not previously adduced) that the WOLL-like operator is modal in nature. It follows from the analysis presented
here that there are only two (probably related) differences between St’át’imcets and English in the area of tense. The first
is that St’át’imcets lacks tense morphemes which are pronounced. The second is that the St’át’imcets tense morpheme is semantically
underspecified compared to English ones. In each of these respects, the St’át’imcets tense morpheme displays similar properties
to pronouns, which may be covert and which may fail to distinguish person, number or gender. Along the way, I point out several
striking and subtle similarities in the interpretive possibilities of St’át’imcets and English. I suggest that these similarities
may reveal non-accidental properties of tense systems in natural language. I conclude with discussion of the implications
of the analysis for cross-linguistic variation, learnability and the possible existence of tenseless languages.
This paper outlines a framework of the temporal interpretation in Chinese with a special focus on complement and relative
clauses. It argues that not only does Chinese have no morphological tenses but there is no need to resort to covert semantic
features under a tense node in order to interpret time in Chinese. Instead, it utilises various factors such as the information
provided by default aspect, the tense-aspect particles, and pragmatic reasoning to determine the temporal interpretation of
sentences. It is shown that aspectual markers in Chinese play the same role that tense plays in a tense language. This result
implies that the Chinese phrase structure has AspP above VP but no TP is above AspP.
The Eskimo language Kalaallisut (alias West Greenlandic) has traditionally been described as having a rich tense system, with three future tenses (Kleinschmidt
1851; Bergsland 1955; Fortescue 1984) and possibly four past tenses (Fortescue 1984). Recently, however, Shaer (2003) has
challenged these traditional claims, arguing that Kalaallisut is, in fact, tenseless.
This paper settles the debate, in favour of Shaer, based on text studies examining how the English future auxiliaries will/would and is/was going to are rendered in Kalaallisut translations of five books: Harry Potter, The Old Man and the Sea, Pippi Longstocking (translated from the Swedish), The Blind Colt, and Black Star, Bright Dawn. The results of these five text studies are reported here in detail and in theory-neutral terms. They conclusively show that
Kalaallisut is truly tenseless, but has an alternative system that conveys temporal information, even about the future, as
precisely as the English tenses.
Temporal Anaphora im Englischen
- Hinrichs Erhard
Proceedings of SALT XIII
- David Beaver
- Cleo Condoravdi
Approaches to Natural Language
- Richard Montague
Time, Tense, and Quantifiers
- Rainer Bäuerle
- Arnim Stechow
Ellipsis, Tense and Questions
- Irene Heim
Proceedings from SALT VIII
- Angelika Kratzer
The Oxford Handbook of Tense and Aspect
- Toshiyuki Ogihara
- Yael Sharvit
Phrase Structure and the Lexicon
- Tim Stowell
Anaphora: An Overview
- Karen Zagona
Formal Methods in the Study of Language
- Hans Kamp
Handbook of Philosophical Logic
- Steven Kuhn
- Paul Portner
Proceedings from SALT V
- Arnim Stechow