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Past Tense transportation in English

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Rodney Huddleston
Rodney Huddleston
Affiliation:
University of Queensland
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Extract

Poutsma (1926: 441–447) says of sentences like: (I) I could have got the money easily enough. that ‘the notion of completed action in this combination [is expressed] not in the finite verb, where it logically belongs, but in the following infinitive’. He speaks of this phenomenon as ‘tense-shifting’; I have preferred ‘past tense transportation’ (PTT) in order to make it clear that it is only the Past Tense that is involved, I and to avoid confusion with the quite different but more frequent use of ‘tense- shifting’ in accounts of the ‘sequence of tenses’ in indirect speech, etc., where a direct speech non-Past is commonly said to be ‘backshifted’ to a Past Tense (She is ill ∽ He said she was ill).

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 13 , Issue 1 , March 1977 , pp. 43 - 52
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1977

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References

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