Present Tense

doi:10.1017/9781108766401.012

7 - Present Tense

from Part IV - Locating and Inferring

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 October 2022

Corien Bary

Edited by

Daniel Altshuler

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Daniel Altshuler: Affiliation:
University of Oxford

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Summary

Tenses are one of the main devices for encoding time in language. Philosophers’ interest in tense goes back at least to Aristotle who discusses in his De Interpretatione whether or not sentences about the future have a truth value. While philosophers were originally mainly interested in the future tense, work in semantics has shown in the last decades that the present tense poses many challenges as well, challenges that are interesting for linguists and philosophers alike. This paper discusses two particularly complex present tense phenomena: the present tense in complements of indirect speech and attitude reports, and the historical present. It argues that a holistic understanding of the present tense would require collaboration between formal semantics and other fields of language study, such as psycholinguistics, cognitive linguistics, philosophy of language, mind and fiction, literature study and narratology.

Keywords

present tense tense semantics double access historical present linguistic experiments narratology

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Type: Chapter
Information: Linguistics Meets Philosophy , pp. 217 - 242

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108766401.012 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2022

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