The Domain of Tense

Abstract

The syntactic domain of tense is the clause: tense appears in some form in every clause of a tensed language. Semantic interpretation of tense requires information from context, however. This has been clear at least since Partee’s (1984) demonstration of the anaphoric properties of tense. In this chapter, I will show that the facts about context are quite complex, perhaps more so than has been appreciated. There are three patterns of tense interpretation according to the type of discourse context in which a clause appears. I will introduce the notion of discourse mode to account for the different types of context. I offer an interpretation of tense in Discourse Representation Theory, a framework that is organized to deal with information from the context. I also show that a syntactically based theory can handle contextually based tense interpretation.