Remarks on Salkie and Reed’s (1997) ‘pragmatic hypothesis’ of tense in reported speech (original) (raw)

Constraints on Tense Choice in Reported Speech

Studia Linguistica, 2008

In reported speech, a rhaf-clause depending on a reporting verb in the past tense can under certain conditions use the present tense instead of the past tense: He strid thur his nume wus/is John. The conditions in question have often been discussed in the literature (see especially Riddle 1978). The present article concentrates on the factors that hamper or prevent the use of the present tense. Some o f these have to d o with the fact that a reporting verb creates an intensional domain, others are related to the speaker's choice of 'temporal focus'. All in all, the factors appear to be numerous and of many different types: they have to do with syntax, semantics, pragmatics, communication structure and context. The theoretical relevance of these findings is that they cast doubt on the traditional 'sequence of tense' analysis of reported speech and corroborate the analysis in terms of 'temporal domains' proposed in Declerck (1 99 1).

From Reichenbach (1947) to Comrie (1985) and beyond: towards a theory of tense

This paper investigates the meanings of the tenses and the system of time reference in English. It starts from a discussion of the celebrated theory of Reichenbach (1947) and the alternative recently proposed in Comrie's (1985) book on tense. The author argues that both theories are deficient in certain respects, and develops a theory which both retains the good points from Reichenbach and Cornrie and remedies the defects. It is claimed that this theory not only accounts for the use of the various tenses in English (including the often neglected present perfect) but also accounts for the use of the different kinds of temporal adverbials. It is also argued that the theory offers a satisfactory explanation for the phenomena observed in connection with indirect speech and free indirect speech.

On the Mechanism of Interpreting English Tenses in Indirect Speech Complement Clauses

ENGLISH LINGUISTICS, 1998

This paper provides a principled explanation of the mechanism of interpreting English tenses in indirect speech complement clauses. To this end, the paper proposes an interpretive principle which is based on two theories: a compositional tense theory and Hirose's (1995, 1997a, 1997b) theory of reported speech. The former theory requires a distinction between the level of tense structure and the level of tense interpretation, on one hand, and a distinction between the absolute and the relative tense component, on the other; the latter theory introduces the notions of public self and private self. It will be shown that the proposed principle can not only solve problems with previous analyses, but also account for a variety of related temporal phenomena in English indirect speech.* * I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Yukio Hirose and Masao Okazaki for giving me invaluable comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this paper. I also thank the following people: Yuichi Mori for fruitful discussions; two anonymous EL reviewers for their insightful comments; Joyce Cunningham, Linda Ghan, and Nina Padden for answering my questions about English data and improving my English. All remaining inadequacies are, of course, my own.

The Oxford Handbook of Tense and Aspect

2012

when discussing theories of the perfect. In section 3, we investigate in more detail theories of the perfect focusing on semantic characteristics, bearing in mind that most of the discussions have revolved around perfects in European languages (Germanic and Romance). In section 4, we discuss accounts of how pragmatic factors and discourse relations aff ect the use of the perfect, and in section 5, we conclude by examining the place of a perfect in a tense/aspect system more generally, considering how it relates to categories such as the resultative and the simple past, and also to the habitual and the prospective.