Sequence of Tense: Syntax, Semantics, Pragmatics

The analysis of sentences taking part in the semantico-syntactic ‘X said that [content of that]’ schema, in the second part of which verb forms in all nine Bulgarian tenses are used, demonstrates that five of the types of sentences obtained are non-grammatical, and four are grammatical. In the main cases, with the aorist and the imperfect, which are witness-forms, non-grammaticality is due to speaker ghosting, a phenomenon which has been revealed by the author in previous publications. Non-grammaticality with the future in the past and the pluperfect is due to the fact that the verb forms have non-cancelable content, and not because they are witness-forms, as claimed by some authors. The main conclusion of the study, in contrast to previous conceptions in Bulgarian grammars and in Bulgarian linguistics in general, is that the Bulgarian language has a ‘sequence of tense and mood’ rule.

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Sequence of Tense and Simplicity

Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics - The Processing of Tense ◽

10.1007/978-94-010-0568-5_4 ◽

2001 ◽

pp. 165-211

Author(s):

Michael Walsh Dickey

Keyword(s):

Sequence Of Tense

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Deriving the Properties of Sequence-of-Tense Structures

As Time Goes By ◽

10.7551/mitpress/1449.003.0007 ◽

1993 ◽

Keyword(s):

Sequence Of Tense

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Why is Sequence of Tense Obligatory?

Tense, Aspect, and Indexicality ◽

10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199239313.003.0005 ◽

2009 ◽

pp. 83-101

Author(s):

James Higginbotham

Keyword(s):

Sequence Of Tense

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Sequence of optional tense

Semantics and Linguistic Theory ◽

10.3765/salt.v27i0.4170 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 27 ◽

pp. 636 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

M. Ryan Bochnak

Keyword(s):

Propositional Attitude ◽

Past Tense ◽

Syntactic Rule ◽

Complement Clause ◽

Embedded Clauses ◽

Present Tense ◽

Sequence Of Tense

In English, sentences containing a past tense in the complement clause of a past-marked propositional attitude predicate (e.g, John said Mary was sick) are ambiguous between a simultaneous and a back-shifted reading, in a phenomenon known as Sequence of Tense. In languages like Japanese, only a shifted reading is available for such past-under-past sentences. Two families of theories have been proposed in the literature to account for this variation: structural and pragmatic. Structural accounts rely on a syntactic rule or licensing condition to derive simultaneous readings of embedded clauses. Pragmatic accounts rely on competition between past and present tense in embedded clauses to derive the readings. In this paper, I provide new data from Washo, an optional tense language, to weigh in on these theories. In Washo, both tensed and (past-oriented) tenseless embedded clauses can have simultaneous and back-shifted readings. I argue that structural approaches can account for the Washo generalizations fairly straightforwardly, while pragmatic approaches encounter difficulties. The result is that the distribution of simultaneous readings cross-linguistically is more fruitfully viewed as a syntactic phenomenon rather than a pragmatic one.

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Adverbs of Quantification and Sequence-of-Tense Phenomena

Semantics and Linguistic Theory ◽

10.3765/salt.v4i0.2455 ◽

1994 ◽

Vol 4 ◽

pp. 251 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Toshiyuki Ogihara

Keyword(s):

Adverbs Of Quantification ◽

Sequence Of Tense

No abstract.

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Tense in Temporal Adjunct Clauses

Semantics and Linguistic Theory ◽

10.3765/salt.v0i0.2814 ◽

2015 ◽

pp. 1

Author(s):

Ana Arregui ◽

Kiyomi Kusumoto

Keyword(s):

Subordinate Clauses ◽

Complement Clauses ◽

Present Tense ◽

Sequence Of Tense

The behaviour of tense in subordinate clauses is not uniform across languages and theories that deal with the interpretation of tense try to explain this. The interpretation of past and present tense in complement clauses is one of the well known puzzles. Languages differ on this respect, and have been classified accordingly as sequence of tense languages (e.g. English) and non-sequence of tense languages (e.g. Japanese). In this paper we will be concerned mainly with the interpretation of tenses in temporal adjunct clauses (TACs). We will discuss the analysis proposed by Ogihara [1994, 1996] and argue that the differences in tense distribution that we observe between English and Japanese TACs are not to be explained as a case of sequence of tense.

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