This paper discusses a subjunctive construction, namely, the past tense used for present state in Japanese (Teramura 1984). Unlike in Korean and other languages, the past tense marker “ta” can express an unexpected finding or remembrance at the speech time (Inoue and Ubukoshi 1997). I claim the existence of a covert antecedent clause in this construction, and that counterfactuality is involved ...

This paper promotes the hypothesis that central grammatical categories must be analysed as pragmatic rather than semantic entities, in order to explain their seemingly redundant typological distribution. A case is made of the relatively complex English past tense system versus the single Russian past tense, and it is shown how the distinctions within the former system can be analysed in terms o...

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...

In this paper we present RTMML, a markup language for the tenses of verbs and temporal relations between verbs. There is a richness to tense in language that is not fully captured by existing temporal annotation schemata. Following Reichenbach we present an analysis of tense in terms of abstract time points, with the aim of supporting automated processing of tense and temporal relations in lang...

This study presents results from sentence-completion and grammaticality-judgment tasks with 7 German-speaking agrammatic aphasics and 7 age-matched control subjects examining tense and subject-verb agreement marking. For both experimental tasks, we found that the aphasics achieved high correctness scores for agreement, while tense marking was severely impaired. To account for the observed tense...

The first paper, by L. Schubert and C. Hwang, concentrated on compositionally defining the mapping between a sentence and an appropriate meaning representation that takes tense and aspect into account. In order to derive non-indexical formulae from indexical ones as a function of context, they make use of a novel type of context component, a tense tree which evolves throughout the discourse. Oc...

In this paper we propose a method to compositionally interpret tenses of Japanese complex sentences on the basis of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar and Discourse Representation Theory. In this approach, each of the tense-bearing forms such as main verbs and the past auxiliary is given a single temporal meaning independent of its position in the syntactic structure. The `relative tense theo...

Compositionality is a critical and universal characteristic of human language. It is found at numerous levels, including the combination of morphemes into words and of words into phrases and sentences. These compositional patterns can generally be characterized by rules. For example, the past tense of most English verbs ("regulars") is formed by adding an -ed suffix. However, many complex lingu...

Clearly produced vowels exhibit longer duration and more extreme spectral properties than plain, conversational vowels. These features also characterize tense relative to lax vowels. This study explored the interaction of clear-speech and tensity effects by comparing clear and plain productions of three English tense-lax vowel pairs (/i-ɪ/, /ɑ-ʌ/, /u-ʊ/ in /kVd/ words). Both temporal and spectr...