Wallace L. Chafe’s scientific contributions

Linguistic and psychological concerns are seen to converge in the area of semantics in such a way as to suggest the value, for both disciplines, of 'psychosemantic' studies. This paper illustrates some of the possibilities by providing linguistic evidence for three kinds of memory, called surface, shallow, and deep. The evidence deals with the occurrence of temporal adverbs in English and with their intonation and order, as well as with the non-generic perfective. A classification of memory by psychologists into sensory, primary (short-term), and secondary (long-term) is discussed, and is seen to coincide only in part with-though not to conflict with-the linguistically motivated classification. The relevance of memory to the use of tenses is briefly explored, and it is observed that the tripartite classification of memory is mirrored in our concept of the future.