THE PROCESSING OF TENSE: PSYCHOLINGUISTIC STUDIES ON THE INTERPRETATION OF TENSE AND TEMPORAL RELATIONS. Michael Walsh Dickey. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001. Pp. xiii + 310. $148.00 cloth, $58.00 paper.

Extract

This book presents a psycholinguistic investigation of how the English past tense is interpreted by adult English native speakers (NSs) during on-line sentence comprehension. Structurally speaking, tense is a morphosyntactic category of the verb and bears semantic content: In other words, it locates the event described by the sentence with respect to the speech time and also other events in discourse. In chapter 1, Dickey presents extensive background on the semantic literature on tense and sentence processing and introduces several research questions: how and when the language processor assigns an interpretation to tense markers, whether the domain of interpretation is the sentence or the discourse, whether interpretation is assigned immediately or is delayed, and whether discourse or syntactic simplicity guides the analysis of temporal interpretation. To answer these questions, Dickey focuses on three phenomena—interpretation of aspect with temporal adverbials and adverb preposing (John had left at 5 vs. At 5, John had left), interpretation of tense in matrix contexts and temporal anaphora (Sheila had a party last Friday; Sam got drunk), and interpretation of sequence of tense phenomena (John said that Mary was sick)—which he develops and tests empirically in chapters 2, 3, and 4, respectively. In chapter 5, the conclusion, remaining questions are addressed. The book presents a total of seven experiments using a self-paced reading task, which measures reaction times at critical segments of a given sentence, to see how semantic ambiguity is resolved by the language processor.