Fake Tense in Conditional Sentences A modal approach
نویسنده
چکیده
Many languages allow for ”fake” uses of their past tense marker: the marker can occur in certain contexts without conveying temporal pastness. Instead it appears to bear a modal meaning. Iatridou [2000] has coined this phenomenon Fake Tense. Fake Tense is particularly common to conditional construction. This paper proposes to explain Fake Tense in English conditional sentences as a certain kind of ambiguity: the past tense morphology can signal the presence of a temporal operator, but it can also mark the specific modal operator. The ambiguity is proposed to be the result of recategorization: the Simple Past develops a second, modal meaning because of structural similarities between the temporal and the modal/epistemic domain. The proposal is spelled out in the Generative Semantic framework [Heim and Kratzer, 1998] approaching conditionals using a modified version of the restrictor approach [Kratzer, 1979, 1991b] and building on von Stechows et al.’s recent work on the English Tense system [Stechow, 2010, Romero and von Stechow, 2008].
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