Embedded Present Tense and Attitude Reports

Tense and the Speaker's Attitude in English

This paper gives attention to the so-called Sequence of Tenses phenomenon in English and explores what sorts of factors influence tense choice. Our analysis proves that what plays the crucial role in tense choice is the reporting speaker's attitude to the message, and that he or she chooses the tense taking three simplified factors into consideration: the semantic relation between the reporting...

Perspective, logophoricity, and embedded tense in Japanese

The organization of the paper is as follows. In Section 2, I review the two major approaches to Japanese tenses in past studies, i.e. the “uniform/non-indexical” approach (e.g. Ogihara 1996) and the “non-uniform/indexical” approach (e.g. Oshima 2006a), drawing on data that involve tenses in matrix clauses and in complement clauses (of utterance/attitude predicates).1 In Section 3, I consider te...

Conditionals as attitude reports

Most theories of conditionals and attitudes do not analyze either phenomenon in terms of the other. A few view attitude reports as a species of conditionals (e.g. Stalnaker 1984, Heim 1992). Based on evidence from Kalaallisut, this paper argues for the opposite thesis: conditionals are a species of attitude reports. The argument builds on prior findings that conditionals are modal topic-comment...

Tony Roberts Favour the present tense

I recommend the rule “if in doubt use the present tense”. Higham (1998), [1], §4.29 The present tense works well for scientific writing. The eternal truths we present in an article should all be in the present tense: instead of “experiments have shown that”, prefer “experiments show that”. The present tense helps make more active writing. Write derivations in the present tense: not the past ten...

Attitude Reports , Events , and Partial Models