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 verb and the reported message, the syntactic relation between the reporting clause and the reported clause, and extra-sentential, pragmatic factors. It is shown that although the reporting speaker is the final authority in choosing tense, he or she has to resort to