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.

We defend an acquaintance-based semantics for ‘de re’ attitude reports. We begin by surveying the philosophical literature on the logical form of the ‘de re’, with particular attention to how acquaintance relations solve the problem posed by so-called double vision scenarios. We reject the view that cognitive contact with the ‘res’ requires causal interaction: the causal conception of acquaintance is inadequately motivated in the philosophical literature on the ‘de re’. We then turn to other linguistic data. We show that the ‘de re’ analysis is needed to account for certain tense constructions. The success of this application provides a further reason to reject an exclusively causal conception of acquaintance, since the kind of cognitive contact relevant to ‘de re’ attitudes towards times cannot plausibly be causal. We discuss objections to the ‘de re’ analysis of tense, such as the apparent unavailability of double vision scenarios involving times. We consider various additional principles and constraints that further refine the theory’s predictions, and conclude that while further research is needed to fully vindicate the ‘de re’ analysis in this application, it offers the most unified and well-motivated account of the embedded tense data currently on offer.

Here we round up three topics not covered elsewhere in the book. The first is embedded tense, which gives rise to two main puzzles: sequence of tense (embedded past tense that seems not to be interpreted) and double access (embedded present tense that seems to be anchored both to the utterance time and to the matrix evaluation time). We discuss theories of tense in attitude reports that grapple with these puzzles. The second topic is Neg Raising: sometimes, a negated attitude report seems to be interpreted as though the negation were embedded in the complement clause (e.g., a salient reading of Beatrix doesn’t think it’s raining is Beatrix thinks that it’s not raining). We discuss syntactic solutions (negation is pronounced high but interpreted low) as well as semantic/pragmatic solutions (the unexpected interpretation is the result of a semantic or pragmatic inference). Finally, the third topic is intensional transitive verbs, which create attitude reports with ordinary direct objects rather than complement clauses (e.g., Beatrix wants a frisbee or Beatrix is looking for Polly). We discuss the implications of such sentences for the status of intensionality in grammar.