On the Proper Treatment of Tense

Abstract

IntroductionThis paper is mainly concerned with tense in embedded constructions.Ibelieve that recent research -notably the work by Ogihara (1989) and Abusch (1993) has contributed much to our better understanding of its semantics.The proposals made by the two authors are, however, still too simplistic in some regards.Among other things, they neglect the interplay of tense with temporal adverbs of quantification and with frame-setters.To get this composition right is a touchstone for every theory of tense and tense semanticists have been concerned with this problem from the beginning on, as witnessed by the analyses in Kratzer (1978), Bauerle ( 1979), Dowty (197911982), to mention a few.The claim I want to stress in this article is that in complements of attitudes, we can never have a "referential " tense, i.e., an absolute or anaphorical tense.Every tense occurrin g there will tum out to be a bound tense.I think this claim is implicit in Ogihara's ( 1989) analysis, and it is made explicit in Abusch's (1993) approach.The composition of bound tense with the two kinds of adverbs mentioned will require rather elaborate techniques and I am not sure whether I have been entirely successful, but I hope that the solution is basically corr ect.

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