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.

The introduction discusses the relationship between grammatical tense and the conceptualisation of time. It then presents an overview of the argument of each of the book's chapters. A discussion follows of aspects of Mental Spaces Theory, with special attention paid to the concepts of the 'ground' and of 'representation'. Points of the Classical Greek tense and aspect system are discussed.

The use of the present tense to refer to past events may depend on two conceptual scenarios. First, the speaker may be mentally displaced to the past. Second, the speaker may pretend that the past events are currently accessible in the form of a representation. This 'representation' scenario is generally the most economic conceptual explanation for the use of the present tense to refer past events. Examples are discussed to illustrate the argument: passages from the novels of Alexandre Dumas and from Thomas Hughes' Tom Brown's schooldays; narratives accompanying security camera footage; a narrative by a character in an episode of Seinfeld; and passages from Thucydides. In all these cases the use of the present tense to refer to past events can be made sense of in terms of a conceptual representation scenario, where the difference lies in the exact nature of the representation. The more concrete the representation, the stronger the tendency for the speaker to use the present tense to designate the described events.