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7 - Present Tense

from Part IV - Locating and Inferring

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 October 2022

By
Corien Bary
Edited by
Daniel Altshuler
Daniel Altshuler
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
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Summary

Tenses are one of the main devices for encoding time in language. Philosophers’ interest in tense goes back at least to Aristotle who discusses in his De Interpretatione whether or not sentences about the future have a truth value. While philosophers were originally mainly interested in the future tense, work in semantics has shown in the last decades that the present tense poses many challenges as well, challenges that are interesting for linguists and philosophers alike. This paper discusses two particularly complex present tense phenomena: the present tense in complements of indirect speech and attitude reports, and the historical present. It argues that a holistic understanding of the present tense would require collaboration between formal semantics and other fields of language study, such as psycholinguistics, cognitive linguistics, philosophy of language, mind and fiction, literature study and narratology.

Keywords

present tensetense semanticsdouble accesshistorical presentlinguistic experimentsnarratology
Type
Chapter
Information
Linguistics Meets Philosophy , pp. 217 - 242
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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  • Present Tense
  • Edited by Daniel Altshuler, University of Oxford
  • Book: Linguistics Meets Philosophy
  • Online publication: 06 October 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108766401.012
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  • Present Tense
  • Edited by Daniel Altshuler, University of Oxford
  • Book: Linguistics Meets Philosophy
  • Online publication: 06 October 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108766401.012
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Present Tense
  • Edited by Daniel Altshuler, University of Oxford
  • Book: Linguistics Meets Philosophy
  • Online publication: 06 October 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108766401.012
Available formats
×