Non-deictic tenses in conditionals

The English tenses are often claimed to be deictic, i.e. to make reference to the utterance time and localize some state of affairs relative to it. For instance, the simple past is proposed to convey that the eventuality described in its scope took place at some contextually given time in the past of the utterance time. Let us call the time with respect to which the tenses locate their eventuality the anchor of the tense. It is well-known that this approach has difficulties to account for the interpretation of tenses in intensional contexts (Abusch 1997). In this paper we will focus on one particular intensional context in which a deictic theory of tenses turns out to be problematic: conditional sentences. A deictic theory of tense cannot account for examples like (1) that can obtain an interpretation according to which the interview takes place before Peter comes out smiling, but in the future of the utterance time. In this case the anchor of the past tense in the consequent is the event time of the antecedent. The observation is not bound to past tensed consequents, but occurs with consequents in the present tense as well. We do not observe an analogous past-shift of the anchor in case the antecedent is about the past.