Ileana Baciu-Verbal Categories in English

8/20/2019 Ileana Baciu-Verbal Categories in English

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Ileana Baciu 2010-2011 Verbal Categories in English

THE CATEGORY OF TENSE

1.Time vs. Tense

1.1. The generally accepted definition of the category of Tense, as a category delimiting the part of speech verb, explains Tense as representing ‘the chronological order of events in time

as perceived by the speaker at the moment of speaking’ . The notions to be accounted for in

this definition are: chronological order , Time and moment of speaking. These notions will be

clarified in what follows.

1.1.1. Such notions as change or motion – the latter understood as change in location –,

which, as we have seen, are important notions in the conceptual/semantic delimitation of

situation/eventuality types, are possible only through and in the representation of Time.

Moreover, as already mentioned, the conceptual properties of a ‘ situation’ are visible only as

the situation unfolds in Time.To exemplify, ‘the presence of a thing in one place and its non-presence at the same

place can be perceived by a human subject if and only if these two contradictory propertiesare placed sequentially, one after another, that is in ‘Time’ (Stefanescu 1988:216). What this

actually means is that ‘Time ‘ ( just like Space) is the form of our experience of the world.

This means that (for human beings) Time is an epistemic notion not an ontological notion1.

If Time can be viewed as being not a determination of outward phenomena, then it has

to do with neither shape or form. Currently, this want is supplied by analogies and the course

of Time is represented by a line progressing to infinity. This linear representation of Time

preserves the sequential character (i.e. chronological order ) of our perception of the world.

We perceive Time in the same way we perceive Space, i.e. we cannot live in two timessimultaneously as we cannot, at the same time, occupy two spatial locations. It means that

when Time is measured by lived-through eventualities the measurement is unidirectional, i.e.

forwards.Time is a single unbounded dimension, conceptually analogous to Space. Just as an

orientation point is needed to locate positions in space, so an orientation point is needed to

locate situations in time.

As already suggested in the previous chapter, in natural languages the basic

orientation point is the time of utterance (UT-T) (i.e. the moment of speaking), which isalways the Present, that is to say that linguistic communication centers at the speaker . All

linguistic expressions (such as: adverbs : here, there, tomorrow etc.; pronouns: I, you, this,that) that are related to the time of speech are known as deictic (i.e. pointing) expressions.

The speaker’s centrality enables the identification of time and place. It also implies an

organizing consciousness which provides a temporal standpoint ‘ from which the speaker

invites his audience to consider the event’ (Smith 1991:138).

Every sentence has a temporal standpoint (identified as AS-T), in simple cases the

same as the temporal location of the situation (EV-T). Generally sentences about the Present

have a present standpoint, and sentences about the Past and Future have past and future

standpoints, respectively.As already mentioned, Time is conventionally represented as a straight line stretching

in both directions from Utterance Time. Such a representation is given in (1) below:

(1) Time line: -------------------UT-T---------------------

Past Present Future

1 Ontological: relating to the study of existence. Situation types are viewed as ontological categories. Epistemic:

(from Greek episteme knowledge) (approx) something discovered through sense/experience.


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On the Time line, times and situations are located at moments or intervals relative to

the Time of utterance. The situations may occur in order (i.e. sequentially) or they may

overlap, wholly or in part.

All sentences give us temporal information which helps us locate in Time the

situation talked about. This temporal information is given by Tense morphemes and timeadverbials.

1.1.2 Tense is a functional category, expressed by a set of verbal inflections or other verbalforms, that expresses ‘a temporal relation to an orientation point’( Smith, 1991).

Tenses have consistent relational values: anteriority, posteriority or simultaneity.

Tenses may have a fixed or flexible orientation. Tenses with fixed orientation are always

related to UT-T. Whenever tenses, or rather, Tense systems are oriented to the moment of

speech (i.e. the speaker) we say that they are used deictically (i.e. they are interpreted as

pointing expressions, just like adverbs (tomorrow, now, here, there) or pronouns (this, that, I,

you)).

The traditional term for tenses that relate to UT-T is absolute tenses. Tenses that relate

to an orientation time other than UT-T are known as relative tenses . Not all temporal reference is made by Tense. In English, the Future is indicated by

another type of morpheme, the modal auxiliary shall/will . It is also common to have a

combination of present tense (or present tense progressive in English) and future time

adverbial that indicates the future, sometimes called Futurate.

Some languages have tenses that indicate Present, Past and Future. Some others have

a tense distinction between past and non-past, still others have a distinction between present

and non-present. Some languages (e.g. Mandarin Chinese, Malay, Classical Hebrew) do not

have the functional category of Tense. For these languages temporal location is expressed

directly by adverbials and indirectly by (viewpoint) aspect.There are also languages where tenses contribute temporal location as well as

aspectual value, i.e. aspectual viewpoint may also be conveyed by Tense. The French‘Impairfait’ and the Romanian ‘Imperfect’, for instance, may also convey a general

imperfective viewpoint. In English, as we have seen, the expression of aspectual viewpoint is

independent of Tense.

1.2. Temporal Adverbials

Alongside Tense, temporal adverbials help us locate in time the situations talked about. As we

have seen in our discussion of Aspect, temporal adverbials also contribute to the aspectualinterpretation of sentences. The classification we adopt has been standardly recognized since

Bennett and Hall-Partee (1972,1978) and Smith (1978), and the list below has been borrowedfrom Crainiceanu (1997).

Temporal adverbials fall into the following classes: (a) locating adverbials (Smith

1978/)1991) or frame adverbials (Bennett &Hall Partee, 1972); (b) duration adverbials; (c)

completive adverbials (Smith, 1991) or containers; (d) frequency adverbials.

Our discussion of temporal adverbials will consider first those under (b) and (c) above,

i.e. duration adverbials and completive adverbials, respectively, because these types of

adverbials also have an aspectual value, requiring compatibility with the situation type.

A. Duration adverbials include the following expressions: for three weeks/a month/a day, fora while, since the war/Christmas, at night, all the afternoon, half the afternoon, for hours, all

the time, over the weekend, through August, a few days, during the war, always, permanently,

all day long, throughout, from June to/till October, all day/night long, etc.Duration adverbials have been defined as:


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- indicating the duration of the described event by specifying the length of time that is

asserted to take (Bennett & Hall- Partee, 1978);

- expressing measures of time that are not specifically confined to future or past (Quirk, 1985)

- contributing to the location of a situation in time (Smith, 1991)

The definitions above suggest that duration adverbials have aspectual value: they are

compatible with atelic sentences and odd with telics, that is to say that duration adverbials aresensitive to the aspectual character of the eventuality description they combine with. They are

restricted to homogeneous eventualities/situations (processes and states) as the examples

below indicate:

(2) (i) Susan was asleep for two hours (atelic)

(ii) Andrew swam for three hours (atelic)

(iii) (?)John wrote a/the report for two hours (telic)

(iv) *The train arrived late for 2 hours

De Swart (1998) adopting current views (Vet, 1994, Moens,1987 and others) points outthat duration adverbials bring in a notion of boundedness.

According to Smith (1991) the role of a single durational with atelic situation types is to

locate an eventuality within the stated interval ,. The interpretation of the sentences above is

that the situation denoted by the predicate (the verb phrase =VP) lasts at least as long as the

denotation of the durative adverbial. Whenever the situation type features and the adverbial

features are compatible, the standard interpretation of the adverbial is to locate the situation

within the stated interval.

Whenever telic events occur in the context of duration adverbials there is a clash between the aspectual properties of the situation type and the aspectual properties of the

adverbials. Such clashes are resolved by a shift in the value of the verb constellation whichreceive a marked interpretation. De Swart (1998) building on ideas developed by Moens

(1987) assumes that the contextual reinterpretation is made possible by the process called

coercion.2

Instantaneous atelic eventualities (semelfactives)3 in the scope of durative adverbials

and durative telic verb constellations (accomplishments) are reinterpreted as atelic/durative in

the context of durationals:

(3) (i) I read a book for a few minutes.(ii) Jerry wrote a report for two hours.

(iii) John knocked on the door for two hours.

The event of book -reading and report-writing is coerced into a process; so is the

semelfactive, which gives the sentence an iterative reading (i.e. the knocking is that of a

process of the multiple- event type; actually an instantaneous atelic eventuality is interpreted

2 Coercion is viewed as an operator that would yield an eventuality of the appropriate type which, then, can

combine with the durative adverbial to result in a bounded process. The value of the operator is dependent on

linguistic context and world knowledge3 The incompatibility of atelic instantaneous eventualities of the ‘knock’ type suggests that actually the feature

that characterizes durationals is as their name suggest [+durative]. One of the reasons to include such predicateswithin the class of achievements must have been the incompatibility of these predicates with this class of

adverbials.


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as ‘durative’). The two telic events (3a,b) are not interpreted as involving natural endpoints. It

is to be noticed that the direct object NPs are indefinite.

In the case of accomplishments with definite NPs in object position the sentence is

interpreted as a process of the multiple-event type (i.e. an iterative reading) or as a state (i.e.

iterative/habitual reading); the same interpretation is valid for achievement predicates. It is

true that in the examples below the form of the adverbial crucially contributes to the habitual reading:

(4) (i) John played the sonata for 2 hours.

(ii) For years, Mary went to school in the morning.

(iii) For months, the train arrived late.

We think that a distinction should be made between the example in (4c) above and the

example borrowed from Dowty (1979) and given in (4’) below. In this latter case, (as already

mentioned) the entire situation is interpreted as a process (habitual of the multiple-event type)

due to the uncountable NP in direct object position, i.e. the adverbial takes in its scope a

process predication not an achievement predication:

(4’) All that summer , John found crabgrass in his yard

We have to stress the fact, acknowledged by linguists, that the felicity of an aspectual

reinterpretation is strongly dependent on linguistic context and knowledge of the world as the

example below indicates. In this case there is no possible shifted interpretation and the

sentence is odd:

(5) (??)Mary reached the top for an hour

B. Completive adverbials are also known as containers (or adverbials of the interval (Smith,1991)) and include expressions like in 2 hours, within two months, and their role is to locate

a situation/eventuality at an interval during which the event is completed/culminates.

Aspectually, completive adverbials are telic. The assumption, then, is that they are

compatible with telic eventualities and odd with atelics. The examples below (borrowed from

Smith 1991:157) confirm this assumption:

(6) (i) John drew a circle in five seconds

(ii) Mary wrote a sonnet in ten minutes (iii) ?Bill swam laps in an hour

(iv) ?Mary believed in ghosts in an hour

Since completives denote an interval within which the situation occurred/took place,

the atelic situations in (6iii,iv) are difficult to interpret. If they can be understood at all, they

impose an ingressive interpretation to the entire sentence, in the sense that the adverbials refer

to an interval elapsed before the beginning of the situation and not to an interval during

which the situation occurs. Depending on linguistic context and knowledge of the world the

sentence in (6iii) above may also be reinterpreted as telic in the context of completive

adverbials, i.e. the reinterpretation may ascribe a natural endpoint to the eventuality. The possible readings for (6iii) would be as in (7i,ii) below and (7iii) for (6iv):

(7) (i) Bill swam his planned number of laps (with)in an hour. (ii) In/After an hour, Bill swam his laps.


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(iii) At the end of/after an hour she began to believe in ghosts.

As far as (6iv) is concerned, the eventuality is taken as inchoative, as the paraphrase in (7iii)

shows. The inchoative is an Achievement and has the ingressive interpretation that standardly

occurs for achievements (and semelfactives, for that matter) with completive adverbials as in

the following examples:

(8) (i) They reached the top in ten minutes. (ii) He won the race in ten minutes.

(iii) She knocked at the door in ten minutes.

Another clash is to be noticed with the imperfective viewpoint. Telic adverbials are

incompatible with the progressive aspect. According to Smith (1991:159), in general, all

imperfectives in combination with completive adverbials have an ingressive reading, i.e. the

eventualities occurs at the end of the time interval referred to by the adverbial. The example

below has such a reading:

(9) In an hour , Bill was walking to work.

C. Frequency adverbials also give information that contributes to the temporal location of a

situation (Smith 1991). Specifically they indicate the recurrent pattern of situations within the

reference interval. The adverbial expression of frequency reinforces the notion of repetition,

iteration:

(10) (i) Samuel cycles to work most days, every day.

(ii) We always/often went to the mountains in wintertime

As already mentioned such sentences express a series of individual events which, as a whole,make a state of the habitual type. Examples of frequency adverbials are: frequently, on

Sundays, never, sometimes, often, whenever, monthly, daily, once a week, every

week/month/year, usually, seldom, etc.

D. Locating Adverbials (or Frame Adverbials). This type of adverbials contribute to the

specification of Situation Time or Assertion Time. Generally, sentences with one time

adverbial specify Assertion Time.

As the name ‘frame’ adverbial indicates, they refer to ‘ an interval of time within which

the described action is asserted to have taken place’ (Bennett& Hall Partee, 1978). Thesituation talked about in the sentence fills all or part of the time specified by the adverbial

(Smith, 1991).Just like Tense, frame adverbials require an orientation point, and just like Tense they

mirror the three possible temporal relations: simultaneity, anteriority and posteriority. Frame

adverbials have the role ‘to locate situations in time by relating them to other times or to other

situations (Smith, 1991). According to the time of orientation they indicate we can distinguish

three classes:

(i) Deictic adverbials: which are oriented to the time of utterance. Such adverbials are

represented by the following expressions: now, today, last Sunday, last week, thisweek/year, tomorrow, next week, the day after tomorrow, tonight, a week ago, etc.

As can be noticed, all adverbials in this class refer to some specific time span

which is related to some other specific time span which is UT-T, but most of themgive only the ‘maximal boundaries’ of the time span(s) in question (Klein, 1992)


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(ii) Anaphoric adverbials include time expressions that ‘relate to a previously

established time’ (Smith, 1978) such as : until, till, in the evening, on Sunday, at

night, early, before, in three days, on Christmas, at lunchtime, two years later, in

March, already, etc. In this case too, we have only the ‘maximal boundary’ of the

time span in question.

(iii)

Referential adverbials which refer to a time established by clock or calendar(Smith, 1978), such as: at six, August 19, in 1987 , etc

The time adverbials that are explicitly related to the time of utterance are known as

‘anchored’ adverbials. Deictic adverbs are ‘anchored’ adverbials. The last two classes are

known as being ‘unanchored’, i.e. they are not anchored to the utterance time, their

interpretation is made possible by an orientation point other than the time of utterance.

According to their form, frame adverbials can be (i) simple or (ii) complex.

(i)Simple adverbials include expressions like :now, yesterday, tomorrow

(ii) Complex adverbials exhibit two types of complexity:

(a) the complex adverbial consists of two or several concatenated adverbs: yesterday afternoon, tomorrow morning at 5. Complex time adverbials, inthese cases, are taken as single units in temporal interpretation establishing the

interval of time within which the described action is asserted to have taken

place . For examples like the one below the complex adverbial, in conjunction

with the tense morpheme, specifies AS-T:

(11) Bill visited us last Sunday afternoon.

b) the complex adverbial may consist of a preposition and a nominal, theentire group forming one constituent syntactically:

(12) Phyllis decorated the cake before last night.

In simple tense sentences (i.e. without morphological aspect) the relation between the

EV-T and AS-T is taken to be simultaneous, or rather EV-T is included/within AS-T. In such

cases, we may consider the adverbial, in conjunction to the Tense morpheme to specify EV-T.

To conclude, with simple tense forms in root clauses the Event/Situation time is non-distinct

from Assertion Time regarding their relative order to Utterance Time, hence we can assume

that with simple tenses adverbials actually specify EV-T.

2.0. The syntax and interpretation of tenses in root sentences

As we have already mentioned there are three times that are required for the

temporal-aspectual interpretation of sentences. The three times involved are Utterance Time

(UT-T) , Assertion Time (AS-T) and Situation Time(Sit-T), also known in the literature as

Event Time (EV-T)

Adopting current approaches we define Utterance Time as the time at which the event

of uttering the sentence takes place and it may function as an ‘anchoring’ event for another

event or time interval defined as Assertion Time. AS-T has a dual role: it is part of the systemof temporal location for complex sentences, and it gives the temporal standpoint of a sentence

i.e. the locus from which the situation talked about is presented .

The Assertion Time is explicitly given by the finite component of an utterance, i.e. bythe tense morpheme on the verb or auxiliary and represents the ‘anchoring’ time for the


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interval when the situation denoted by the predicate occurs. Locating adverbials like

yesterday, on Sunday etc. generally specify Assertion Time.

Event Time is the time interval at which the situation ‘occurs’ or ‘holds’. It is related

to whatever is expressed by the nonfinite component of the utterance (the ‘lexical (semantic)

content’ of the utterance).

Tense is defined as a relation between AS-T and UT-T, while Aspect relates EV-T toAS-T. We have also mentioned the fact that in the simple tense forms EV-T and AS-T time

are non-distinct regarding their relative order to UT-T and in such cases UT-T can be taken to be the orientation/reference point for the time of the situation/event.

In the simple tenses, therefore, Tense relates the time of utterance, which functions as

reference/anchoring point, and the time at which the situation denoted by the VP occurs or

holds (EV-T/AS-T). AS-T, as we have seen is important for the progressive forms and, as we

shall see, for the Perfect forms and the Futurate.

The standard assumption is that in the simple tenses UT-T may precede (BEFORE),

follow (AFTER) or be included (WITHIN) in the EV-T/AS-T:

• UT-T BEFORE EV-T/AS-T = PAST [-ED]• UT-T AFTER EV-T/AS-T = FUTURE [WILL]

• UT-T WITHIN EV-T/AS-T = PRESENT [-S]

The discussion so far has tried to highlight the fact that both Tense and Aspect relate

two times. This parallelism can be captured syntactically (Stowell 1993, Demirdache&Uribe-

Etxebarria, 2000) by proposing that Aspect (Asp) and Tense (T) are in fact dyadic predicates

of spatio-temporal ordering that take as arguments time-denoting phrases.4 T takes as external

argument UT-T (in root sentences) and AS-T as an internal argument ; Asp takes AS-T as

external argument and EV-T as internal argument.The phrase structure for temporal relations looks like:

(13) TP

UT-T T’

T AspP

AS-T Asp’

Asp VP

EV-T VP

T is a spatio-temporal predicate with the meaning of AFTER (past), BEFORE (future) or

WITHIN (present). ASP, in its turn is also a spatio-temporal predicate with the meaning of

AFTER (perfect aspect), BEFORE (prospective aspect) or WITHIN (progressive aspect).

Whenever ASP (or T) lack morphological content, the external argument and the internal

4 The representation in (13) is the syntactic phrase structure of the linear temporal representation given in the

chapter on Aspect.


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argument are co-indexed; this co-indexation indicates that the two times/events overlap or

coincide. One such particular case occurs in sentences with morphological tense but without

morphological aspect – that is the simple tenses. In such cases, as already mentioned EV-T =

AS-T (i.e. EV-T is WITHIN or included in AS-T). In such cases they are considered as non-

distinct regarding their relative order to UT-T. Whenever Asp has no morphological content

the event is portrayed in its entirety –as including both its initial and its final bounds(perfective viewpoint aspect, in Smith’s (1991) classification)

Time adverbs, just like tenses and aspects, are taken to be phrases headed by a two- place spatio-temporal predicate representing the temporal structure in the syntax and

establishing a relation of inclusion (WITHIN)), precedence (BEFORE) and subsequence

(AFTER).

The proposal put forth by Demirdache&Uribe-Etxebarria, (2004) holds for all types of

time adverbials – locational or durational adverbs expressed syntactically as bare NPs

(Christmas, yesterday) , PPs (after/at/ before last week/Christmas), temporal clauses (CPs)

(while I was reading the book/when he came/since/after she left ).

Recall that these adverbs have been taken to be able to restrict the reference of AS-T

or that of EV-T. Here is an example of the way time adverbs can be integrated within themodel proposed by Demirdache&Uribe-Etxebarria, (2004):

(14) (i) Susan left at/after/before midnight.TP

Ut-T T’

T AspP

after

Ass-Ti Asp’

Ass-Ti PP Asp VP

P DP

at/after/before midnight Ev-Ti VP

The example above illustrates the grammar of Past Tense simple. Past Tense orders the UT-T

after the AS-T. The AS-T is co-indexed (i.e. temporally coincides) with EV-T since Asp has

no morphological content. Co-indexation entails that the event described is portrayed in its

entirety –as including both its initial and final bounds. The UT-T, is thus ordered after the

AST-T/ EV-T , yielding the past (and perfective) interpretation.

The PP in (14), as already argued , serves to restrict the reference of the eventdescribed by the sentence – Susan left -. Syntactically, it functions as a restrictive modifier of

a time-denoting expression – the AS-T or EV-T. In our particular case (i.e example 14) AS-Tis co-temporal with EV-T, hence we get a non-distinct interpretation. The temporal

representation above describes a past event, since the UT-T in (14b) is located after the AS-T – itself co-temporal with EV-T (perfective aspect). The preposition has as external argument

the AS-T and as internal argument the adverbial NP – midnight . So, what the preposition does

is to restrict the reference of the time span denoted by AS-T (past) to the time designated by

the internal argument of the preposition, i.e. midnight . Since the AS-T is co-temporal with

EV-T the PP indirectly provide a location time for the EV-T of the situation described by

(14a).

Consider next the past perfect sentence illustrated in 15(a) below, which is assignedthe temporal structures in (15b,c):


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15) a) Susan had left London at noon

a’) At noon, Susan had left London

b) TP

UT-T T’

T AspP

after

AS-T Asp’

AS-T PP Asp VP

after

P DP

at EV-T VP

c) TP

UT-T T’

T AspP

after

AS-T Asp’

Asp VP

after

EV-T VP

EV-T PP

at DP

The past perfect sentence in (15a) (without the time adverbial) presents Susan’s

departure as having culminated before a reference time, the AS-T, which is itself ordered by

Tense prior to UT-T. In this case the AS-T and the EV-T are disjoint in reference. It can be

naturally predicted that the addition of a temporal adverbial will yield two interpretations for(15a) , but not for (15a’), depending on whether the adverbial modifies the Event Time or the

Assertion Time, as illustrated in (15b,c).

In (15b) the time adverb modifies the AS-T. Susan’s departure is presented as havingoccurred prior to AS-T, which is set at 7 p.m. (i.e. Susan’s leaving occurs prior to 7 p.m.) In

(15c) the time adverb is predicated of the EV-T, the preposition AT restricting the time of the

event to the interval designated by 7 p.m. (i.e. Susan’s leaving occurred at 7 p.m.)

It is a well-known fact that time adverbs may occur at the end or at the beginning of

the sentence.

It is generally assumed that whenever the time adverb occurs in sentence initial

position the time adverb is generally taken to specify AS-T. Hence such a sentence will have

the temporal representation in (15b) above, where the time adverb modifies AS-T.


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2.1 Indefinite Present Tense Sentences. It is generally assumed that the Simple Present

Tense is, par excellence, a deictic tense. Situations reported in the Present enjoy both

psychological being at the present moment (Leech, 1971) and actual being at now.

The ‘interpretive’ constraint (to be accounted for below) that affects present tense

sentences, is that ‘present tense sentences may not include the endpoints of situations’.

Sentences in the Simple Present refer to open situations except for marked uses .As a consequence, in the Present tense and the perfective viewpoint stative sentences

have their normal (open) interpretation (recall that the perfective does not span the endpointsof States) while non-stative verb constellations have a derived habitual / generic

interpretation. As such, from an aspectual point of view all non-stative predicates in the

simple present tense recategorize as stative (Smith, 1991). This generalization accounts for

two of the uses of the indefinite present tense, i.e. the generic and the habitual use.

Linguists and grammarians have distinguished among several uses of the

indefinite/simple present tense (Leech, 1971, Binnick 1991, etc). These include:

• the generic value;

• the habitual value;• the instantaneous/reportive value ;

• the past time (historical) value;

• the future value or futurate.

This wide distribution of the Simple Present is not to be regarded as indicative of the

polysemy of this temporal form; the Simple Present has a core meaning irrespective of

context , i.e. the Simple Present places the UT-T within the AS-T/EV-T .

The past and future values ascribed to the Simple Present should be regarded as a

composite of tense information, lexical aspect and the contribution of adverbs.

2.1.1 The Simple Present Tense and Perfectivity In the previous chapter we argued that, generally, sentences in the simple tense form

have a closed , perfective interpretation. The simple present tense, nevertheless, is an

exception to this generalization, in the sense that the simple present tense is incompatible with

perfective (closed) readings. This constraint is valid for all Germanic and Romance languages

but the consequences are different.

A consequence of the above-mentioned constraint for English is that the simple

present tense of durative events (activities and accomplishments) cannot be used to refer

to one particular instance/ occurrence of the situation denoted by the predicate and have thecontinuous /imperfective interpretation, i.e. in English the simple present tense cannot be used

to describe a non-stative, dynamic event unfolding at UT-T, unlike in other Germaniclanguages and Romance languages. Compare the sentences below:

(16) a) Mary smokes.

b) Maria fumeaza./Maria raucht.

c) Mary eats an apple.

d) Maria mananca un mar./Maria isst ein Apfel.

e) Mary loves John.

f) Maria il iubeste pe Ion./Hannah liebt Johann.

Of all the examples in (16) it is only the last two (i.e. 16 e,f) where there are no

interpretive differences between English and Romanian/German. The sentences in (16 e, f)mean that a certain state holds of the subject at the Utterance Time.


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The examples in (16a-d) include predicates belonging to the class of accomplishments

and activities and, as can be noticed, the English sentences cannot have the imperfective

/continuous reading, that is they cannot mean that ‘ Mary is presently involved in an event of

smoking or eating an apple’ , respectively.

The Romanian/German sentences allow these readings, i.e. they may describe one

particular occurrence of an ongoing, continuous event. In order to get the ongoing reading inEnglish, the present progressive must be used with such predicates.

The neutral interpretation one would assign to the English sentences in (16 a,c) abovewould be habituality5. Actually, this reading is also available for the other Germanic and

Romance languages. Habitual sentences are defined as ‘characterizing’ sentences that

describe a generalization over patterns of events.

Interestingly, English is not different from the other languages as far as the other

possible interpretations of the sentences in (16) above are concerned. The sentences admit the

so-called reportive/instantaneouse reading , where an event is described as perfective but its

time is not directly related to the utterance time. Under the instantaneous reading, the interval

of time normally associated with the event is telescoped to a point . The sentences are assumed

to have a dramatic interpretation having nothing to do with real time, i.e. the event is notdirectly anchored to the utterance time. Such sentences are grammatical as commentary on a

picture, movie or book or when uttered by a radio commentator. Consider the following

examples borrowed from Georgi&Pianesi (1997:153) and Palmer (1978):

(17) (i) In ‘Gone with the wind’ Scarlet writes a letter.

(ii) Napier takes the ball and runs down the wing. He passes the ball to

Attwater. Attwater beats two men, he shoots. It’s a goal!

More will be said about the availability of this interpretation of the simple presenttense in due time.

As far as present tense achievement/semelfactive predicates are concerned, thecontinuous /imperfective reading is unavailable in all Germanic and Romance languages:

(18) (i) Susan finds a book.

(ii) Maria gaseste o carte.

(iii) Hans findet ein Buch.

Achievements/semelfactives have the lexical property that they are single stage

situations, that is they lack a processual stage. Therefore, achievements/semelfactives alwaysdenote closed events. This property holds cross-linguistically. In none of the languages above

can the sentences be interpreted as ongoing at Utterance Time.To summarize, the problems related to the present tense sentences that are to be

accounted for are as follows:

(a) In English, unlike in other Germanic languages and Romance languages,

present tense sentences with an accomplishment or activity predicate can

never describe one particular ongoing/ continuous event;

(b) The imperfective reading with present tense achievement/semelfactive

predicates is unavailable in all Germanic and Romance languages;

5

Recall that the difference between statives and non-statives in the Present tense has been used as a test forstativity. If a constellation has only a habitual action reading with simple (i.e. perfective) aspect and Present

Tense, it is non-stative.


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(c) The impossibility of the simple present tense with the perfective

interpretation as a default.

2.1.2. In the chapter on ‘Aspect’ we argued, following current research, that non-stative

predicates (i.e. dynamic) in the simple/indefinite present are neutrally interpreted as

habitual/generic.The assumption underlying the conclusion above is that a sentence with ‘the perfective

viewpoint’ presents a sentence with the endpoint (i.e. temporal) properties of its situationtype schema’. Moreover, non-stative predicates obey the following truth-condition postulate

(Taylor, 1977):

(19) If V is an activity verb or an accomplishment/achievement verb, then V(x) is only

true at an interval larger than one moment.

Dowty (1979:167), commenting on Taylor’s (1977) postulate, observes that if the

Utterance Time is conceptualized as a moment then the postulate above predicts

that it is impossible to have a deictic present tense with durative, eventive predicates.According to this analysis the impossibility of an ongoing/continuous reading of a

sentence such as Susan sleeps is due to the intrinsic temporal properties of dynamic

predicates and to the fact that the utterance time is a point.

To account for the cross-linguistic differences exemplified in (16) above, (in particular

the problem concerning the impossibility of English present tense non-stative predicates to

have a continuous one-occurrence interpretation) we will adopt a suggestion put forth by

Georgi&Pianisi (1997) already hinted at in the previous chapter.

According to Giorgi&Pianesi (1997) the constraint on the simultaneous/continuous

reading of non-stative verbs is aspectual in nature and can be stated in the form of what theycall the ‘Punctuality Constraint’. Actually, they offer a principled account of the assumptions

given above. The important assumptions Giorgi and Pianesi make are :

(i) the temporal interpretation of an utterance involves the anchoring of the

event denoted by the predicate to the Utterance time, i.e. to the time of the

event which consists of the utterance itself;

(ii) the speech event, as an anchoring event, is conceptualized as punctual;

(iii) all eventive predicates in English are lexically characterized as perfective;

In what follows we shall enlarge upon the last two assumptions put forth byGiorgi&Pianesi.

(i) Georgi&Pianisi (1997) propose that, in English, all eventive (i.e. non-stative) predicates are associated with the feature (+perf). This is necessary in English , but not in

other languages, due to the morphological properties of the English verbs.6 The [+perf]

feature on the verb stems of English non-stative predicates means that such predicates always

6 Giorgi & Pianesi argue that the aspectual feature [+perf] is a Lexicon feature that would ‘compensate’ for the

lack of explicit inflectional verbal morphology . The argument goes that a word like eat can be categorially

ambiguous: it is a ‘naked’ form and can express any of several verbal values, such as the infinitive (without to),

the first and second person singular and the first, second and third person plural, as well as, an ‘object’ (N) or

‘action’ (V). Hence, the only way to discern nouns from verbs is to identify the characteristic feature that would

define the lexical category. In the case of verbs this feature is aspectual.. Romance languages, on the other hand,

need not associate the verb with an aspectual feature because of the rich verbal inflectional morphologycharacterizing this group of languages. The lexical entry of verbs in Romance languages will always have a

much richer feature bundle that would include inflectional features such as person and number .


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denote ‘closed situations’. As already argued, closed/perfective events have all the temporal

properties of the situation type, the endpoint properties included.

Additional evidence in favour of the assumption that verb stems in English always

denote closed events comes from the Accusative +Infinite/Participle construction in English.

Consider the following examples:

(20) (i) Susan saw Mary write the essay.

(ii) Susan saw Mary writing the essay.(iii) Susan saw Mary run.

(iv) Susan saw Mary running.

(v) Susan saw Mary leave.

(vi) Susan saw Mary leaving.

(vii) *Susan saw Mary know the answer.

(viii) *Susan saw Mary knowing the answer.

In English, perception verbs can take two types of complements : either the

Acc+‘bare/naked’ infinitive (i.e. infinitives without to) or Acc+ Present Participleconstructions.

In the first six sentences above, (where the complement is an accomplishment ,

activity and achievement predicate, respectively) the ‘bare’ infinitive form allows only a

perfective/closed reading.

In (20i,ii) the complement is an accomplishment predicate.(20i) entails that Susan

witnessed the entire act of writing, i.e. the sentence in (20i) means that ‘Susan saw an event e,

which is an event of writing , the agent is Mary, and the theme is an essay, and e has reached

the telos’. The complement event expressed as a ‘bare/naked’ infinitive is interpreted as

closed/bounded/perfective.In the example in (20ii), on the other hand, the verb is in the –ing form ; it refers to a

non-closed/non-bounded/imperfective event. Consequently, it is not possible to infer that the

essay was eventually written. Activities and achievements may also occur in such

constructions with the same interpretation, as the examples in (20iii-vi) show.

State predications, on the other hand are excluded in such constructions as the

examples in (20vii,viii) indicate.

(ii) The second assumption put forth by Giorgi& Pianesi is that ‘anchoring ’

events are ‘ punctual ’.

The difference between a ‘closed/perfective event’ and a ‘ punctual event’ is that, while

conceptually, a ‘closed event’ denotes an entity that can be decomposed into a ‘processual part’ (stages) and a ‘boundary’, i.e. ‘e’ has temporal structure, a ‘ punctual event’ cannot be

‘decomposed’ into other elementary events, hence they are not conceptualized as havingtemporal structure.

Punctuality amounts to neglecting temporal structure. The UT-T, as already

mentioned, temporally anchors the time of the situation, hence it can be viewed as an

‘anchoring event’ and consequently as a ‘punctual event’. We give below the ‘interpretive

principle’ necessary to understand the ‘Punctuality Constraint’:

(21) The anchoring event (Utterance Time or some other reference time in the

matrix clause) is punctual(22) Punctuality Constraint

A closed event cannot be simultaneous with a punctual event


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The Interpretive Principle (21) and the Punctuality Constraint (22) very nicely

accommodate the habitual/generic reading of non-stative predicates in the simple present

tense.

The impossibility of a particular continuous/simultaneous reading for simple present

tense eventive sentences follows as a consequence of (a) the Interpretive Principle (21) which

requires the speech event to always be punctual and (b) the Punctuality Constraint (22) whichexpresses the general impossibility of punctual events to be simultaneous with closed (+perf)

events.To put it differently, like any anchoring event, UT-T is punctual; the [+perf] simple

Present tense form cannot be simultaneous with UT-T, since the event denoted by the verb

has internal temporal properties which are incompatible with the punctuality of the anchoring

event; as a consequence the progressive form must be used whenever we want the sentence to

denote a particular ongoing/continuous event , i.e. in English, deictic present is legitimate

with state predicates alone; with dynamic, non-stative eventualities the progressive form is

necessary.

The acceptability of habituals/generics (generalizations over events/properties) is due

to the fact that, in these sentences, the conflict between the punctuality of the Utterance time(viewed as a speech event) and the closure of the event denoted by the predicate does notarise, habituals being understood as asserting the occurrence of a series of events of the same

kind which include the Utterance Time. According to Giorgi and Pianesi a habitual sentence

only requires that UT-T be a temporal part of the interval where the habit holds.

As far as inherent statives are concerned they are not conceptualized as closed (i.e.

as processual or bounded), (recall the truth-condition and the temporal schema associated

with States) hence they can be simultaneous with the punctual anchoring event, describing

‘one particular occurrence’ of the situation denoted by the predicate.

In Romance languages, and some Germanic languages as well, the event expressed bythe present is not viewed as closed/perfective and, hence, can be simultaneous with punctual

anchoring events, with an imperfective reading, naturally.The temporal aspectual interpretation of present tense sentences like, for instance,

Mary smokes/ Mary is clever is provided below:

(23) Mary smokes./ Mary is clever.

(i) UT-T – now

AS-T –present (tense morpheme)

EV-T co-temporal with AS-T(ii) UT-T within AS-T/EV-T

UT-T

…[…… …[… !…]………]……….>

EV-T / AS-T

2.1.3.Values of the Simple Present Tense.

A.The generic/habitual value

Our next step is to try and give a logical account of the uses/values of the simple

present tense identified by grammarians and linguists in the course of time.All grammars of English acknowledge that the basic uses/values of the simple present

tense are the habitual value and the generic value. The question that arises is whether we need

to distinguish between the two, since in both cases the sentences in the present tense aredubbed by linguists as ‘categorical’ sentences, or ‘characterizing’ sentences, consisting in the


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ascription of a property to a subject . In both cases no reference is made to a particular

occurrence of a situation or a unique, definite moment of time. The sentences below

exemplify the two uses:

(24) a) (i) Cats are widespread

(ii) The cat is widespread(iii) *A cat is widespread

(iv) Milk is good for the bones

b) (i) Tigers eat meat

(ii) The tiger eats meat

(iii) A tiger eats meat

c) (i) A lion has a bushy tail

(ii) Lions have a bushy tail(iii) The lion has a bushy tail

(25) (i) My brother/Michael drinks wine with his dinner

(ii) The milkman calls every Monday/on Mondays

We have argued so far that non-stative predicates in the simple present tense in

English will (always) result in a habitual reading of the simple present tense (cf. examples in

(25). The assumption is presumptuous, to say the least, since the examples in (24 b i-iii) do

not have a ‘habitual reading’ but rather a ‘generic’ reading, although the predicates qualifyaspectually as non-stative predicates. So what is the difference, if there is any, between

generic and habitual sentences? Moreover, the examples in (24a) and (24c) are basic stative predicates and they are also characterized as generic. These are the questions that we would

like to answer in the next subchapter.

2.3.1. We are already familiar with the distinction between stage-level and individual-level

predicates due to Carlson (1977). He shows that the distinction between the two types of

predicates has ramifications in the grammar of English. Lately, it has been shown that this

distinction appears widely in language constituting covert grammatical categories in some

languages (e.g. Chinese) (Smith 1991).

Individual level predicates denote relatively stable/permanent properties. Stage-level predicates speak of events and occurrences that have a distinctly temporal tenor (i.e. they

describe situations that are restricted in time and space). In general, verbs that may take the progressive form refer to stage-level interpretations of their subject nominals, describing

transitory/non-permanent properties or situations.

The predicates so differentiated are selective as far as the type of referents to which

they apply is concerned. Individual-level predicates select object-level and kind-level

individuals (i.e. individuals). Stage level predicates apply to stages of individuals.

From an aspectual point of view, as we can see, generic sentences (see 24a-c) are

based on either basic eventive verbs or basic lexical states describing relatively stable

properties of their subject nominals ; the habitual sentences (25) are mostly based oneventive predicates. They are described as ‘characterizing’ sentences. Nevertheless, a few

more subtle distinctions are to be taken into consideration.

Generally speaking, habitual sentences , also known as derived statives, are based on predicates that are basically characterized as stage-level predicates, in particular eventive


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predicates, ; they express dispositions, indicating a potential for an individual (object-level)

to have stage properties, since they denote generalizations over events of the same type over a

period of time. In most sentences there is a frequency adverb (e.g. every day, sometimes,

usually, never, on Mondays, etc) that would support the habitual reading, or, sometimes,

frequency may be expressed by a plural or mass noun in object position, as in (25) or (26)

below:

(26) (i) The milkman calls every Monday/on Mondays(ii) I buy my dresses at Harrods

(iii) We eat very little bread.

(iv)My wife always comes to watch me when I play for England.

(v)My sister smokes.

As Dowty (1979) observes: ‘ Even when we predicate them of an individual at a

particular time, it is really not a property that individual’s current stage has at that moment

that makes them true, but our ‘total experience’ with previous stages of that individual. Wecan truthfully assert that John is in the habit of smoking if we have identified a “suitablenumber” of past occasions on which John’s stage-smoking was true. Such a broad and

pragmatically vague interval presumably also includes a number of future instances of John’s

stage property of smoking’ (Dowty 1979:279).

Habitual sentences are semantically stative, they apply to an object level individual,

who participates in the pattern of events. The predicates underlying habitual sentences are

dynamic predicates at the basic level of classification but their temporal schemata are stative:

they consist of an undifferentiated period rather than successive stages.

On the other hand, as Smith (1991:42) remarks, habitual sentences do not have all the syntactic characteristics of basic-level states. Thus, habitual sentences are good with agent -

oriented adverbials, embedding under verbs like persuade, appearance in pseudo-cleft do sentences and imperatives. The examples illustrate some of these features:

(27) (i) What Mary does is play tennis every Friday.

(ii) I persuaded Mary to play tennis every Friday.

Generic sentences are commonly viewed as analytical sentences, i.e. sentences that

are true by virtue of the meaning of the terms. That means (roughly) that generic sentences

state that a particular property or relation expressed by the predicate holds true of the entitydenoted by the subject noun phrase. The subject noun phrase denotes kind-level (24a) or

object-level individuals (24b)It is already a well-known fact that traditional grammars labeled generic sentences as

‘universal/eternal truths’, ‘timeless truths’ or ‘omnipresent’ sentences. What is actually meant

by these ‘labels’ is the fact that they are ‘a-temporal ’, i.e. from the point of view of their time

specification they do not specify a particular moment or interval of time.

For a long time, an important aspect of generic sentences has been related to the use

of the generic present . The contribution of the Simple Present in generic sentences amounts

to specifying that the state is valid/holds ‘now’, which means that the UT-T is placed within

the AS-T/EV-T.In certain contexts (see examples in 24a), there seems to be a very strong interrelation

between the generic interpretation of the noun phrases and the generic reading of the verb

phrase (ultimately the clause/the sentence), interrelation that will be apparent in the presentation that follows.


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Linguists (e.g. Krifka, et al. 1995:2) claim that generic sentences are ‘true of some

particular entities’ , namely kinds. Hence, genericity can be identified with ‘reference to kind’

and the NPs used are kind-referring NPs or sometimes called generic NPs7 . The sentences in

(23a) above are instances of this type of genericity.

Kind referring NPs are NPs that may co-occur with kind-level predicates such as: die

out , be widespread, be extinct, be in short supply, be common, be indigenous to/in short supply/everywhere, come in all sizes, etc. These NPs refer rigidly to a kind-level individual

and the predicate attributes a property to it that cannot be distributed to the members of thekind, i.e. they make singular statements about a particular kind.8 Such statements have been

called particular/proper kind predications (PKP) (Ter Meulen, 1995: 345, Link, 1995:358))

or definite (or specific) generics (D-generics) (Krifka 1987). They are characterized as being

‘descriptive’ generalizations. One important characteristic of this type of generic statements is

that the predicate (VP) may be progressive, attributing a gradual change in a property to a

kind (e.g. Elephants are dying out (Ter Meulen 1995:346)).

Kind referring expressions are bare plurals, definite singular NPs and mass nouns, but

as the example in (24a iii) above indicates, not indefinite NPs, i.e. indefinite NPs are not

considered kind-referring expressions (i.e. they cannot function as names for kinds). Nevertheless, all traditional grammars mention indefinite NPs as one of the

expressions that may occur in ‘generic sentences’ as the examples in (24b,c), repeated under

(28) for convenience, show:

(28) (i) Lions have a bushy tail

(ii) The lion has a bushy tail

(iii)

A lion has a bushy tail

(iv) Tigers eat meat

(v) The tiger eats meat(vi) A tiger eats meat

It is not difficult to notice that the predicates qualify as basic stage level predicates re-

categorized as individual level predicates. In point of eventuality type, the predicates in the

examples in (28i-iii) are basic state predicates, while those in (28iv-vi) are dynamic

predicates, basically.

The examples in (28) report a kind of general property of individuals that constitute

members (object-level individuals) of the kind, and represents the second type of genericity,

namely characterizing sentences or simply generic sentences, as they express generalizations.

Such statements are known in the literature as the characteristic kind of predication (CKP)(Ter Meulen 1995) or i-generics (i.e. indefinite/non-specific) (Krifka 1987).

Other common terms for characterizing sentences are ‘ gnomic’, ‘dispositional ’‘ general ’ or ‘habitual ’. Kind-denoting (generic) NPs may also occur in characterizing

sentences (see 28) and the sentences describe a general/essential or default property which

holds for the specimens (i.e. object level individuals) of the kind . Often this is expressed

explicitly by an adverbial such as: usually, always, generally, etc.

7 We are already familiar with the distinction made by Carlson (1977) between individuals (that may be objects or kinds) and stages of

individuals (spatio-temporal slices of individuals). K ind-level individuals have certain peculiarities as compared to more normal individuals,

i.e. kinds can be here and there ( they are continuous in space, according to Zemach (1975), they are non- sortals), whereas normal

individuals (object-level individuals) are generally confined to one location at a given time ( they are bound in space, according to Zemach

(1975), they are sortals. For a complete characterization see also Ileana Baciu, Functional Categories in English, 2004. 8 In the sentences in (23a) we have the intuition that the truth or falsity of the statements has nothing whatsoever to do with predicating

widespread or everywhere, for instance, to any particular cats at all. That is to say, intuitively, we could not paraphrase (23a (i)) as ‘ Puffy is

widespread , Duffy is widespread,…….therefore cats are widespread’ . With the examples in (23 b,c), on the other hand, where the predicate‘have a bushy tail/eat meat’ occurs, we have the intuition that the truth or falsity of the statement somehow involves the predication of having

a bushy tail/eating meat to particular lions. Again, in intuitive terms we might think that: ‘ Puffy has a bushy tail/eats meat,, Duffy has a

bushy tail/eats meat , etc………therefore lions have a bushy tail/eat meat.


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An important property of characterizing sentences is that they may be true even when

there are members of the kind which fail to have the property expressed by the predicate.

Characterizing generic sentences are stative sentences (they may be related to inherently

stative predicates or derived stative predicates (i.e. inherently dynamic/stage level predicates

coerced into statives). Habitual sentences will be taken to be included within the class of

characterizing generic sentences.Both ‘habitual/generic sentences’, (see examples in (29)) which are related to

dynamic verbal predicates (drink , smoke, read , laugh, etc) and the so-called ‘lexical ’characterizing sentences which are related to inherently state predicates (have a bushy tail ,

know, cost, weigh, love, fear, possess, have, own, etc) generalize over patterns of

events/properties ; the difference between the two is that while the former have an episodic

counterpart, the latter lack an episodic reading and while the former generalize over events,

the latter generalize over properties.

Characterizing sentences were assumed not to express accidental properties

(e.g.Dahl 1975 among others); they state properties that are essential , necessary, inherent or

analytic (Nunberg and Pan 1975). On the other hand, unlike d-generics, they are not

‘descriptive’ generalizations but ‘normative‘ ones. (Dahl 1975).Characterizing sentences put no limitation on what types of NPs may occur in them.

We can find proper names, definite NPs, indefinite NPs, quantified NPs, bare plural NPs.

Given the variety of NPs in characterizing sentences, the suggestion is that this type

of genericity should be analyzed as a sui generis type of sentence. (Krifka, Pelletier, Carlson,

Link, Chierchia 1995:6)

(29) (i) My brother/Michael drinks wine with his dinner

(ii) Italians drink wine with their dinner

(iii) Every Italian drinks wine with his dinner (iv) An Italian drinks wine with his dinner

As already mentioned, there are certain elements that may enforce a characterizing ,

generic reading such as adverbs like ‘ generally’, ‘usually’, ’typically’, ‘often’, sometimes’

that lead to law-like characterizing sentences.

The above discussion has attempted to stress the fact that the locus of genericity can

be found both at the level of the NP and at the level of the clause.

With bare plural NPs and definite NPs related to kind-level predicates, the locus of

genericity is at the level of the respective NPs, since they are kind-referring expressions, as

well as, in the predicate, as the examples in (23 a) show; kind-referring expressions refer to a specific type of individual, namely kinds, hence, generic bare plural NPs and definite NPs

will be interprepreted as having a specific reading .With indefinite NPs, proper names, quantified NPs the locus of genericity is not in the

NP but rather in the sentence itself , i.e. these NPs cannot be considered ‘kind-referring’ or

‘generic’ in and of themselves. They get a ‘generic’ interpretation only when occurring in

characterizing (generic/habitual) sentences. This type of genericity is independent of verbal

predicates, i.e. the predicates may be both states and non-states and the contribution of the

Simple Present is essential.

The term ‘generic’ sentence will be taken to refer to both types of generic phenomena,

although as we have seen there are differences between the two types.. The contexts that favor a characterizing generic reading are as follows: definitions,

proverbs, geographical statements, law-like, prescriptive statements, habituals:

(30) (i) An apple a day keeps the doctor away.


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(ii) He who laughs last, laughs best.

(iii) A new broom sweeps clean.

(iv) Smooth waters run deep.

(v) Hydrogen is the lightest element

(vi) Oil floats on water.

(vii) Water boils at 100 degrees Celsius(viii) In chess, bishops move diagonally.

(ix) London stands on the Thames.(x) The Severn flows into the Atlantic.

(xi) A symphony has four movements

(xii) An Italian loves opera music.

(xiii) My dog chases cars.

(xiv) Mist and cloud usually render it impossible to see the sun rise from the

sea.

B.The Instantaneous/Reportive Simple Present Tense, is another value/use of the Simple

Present Tense. The general assumption is that this value is a marked use of the perfectiveviewpoint in Present sentences (Smith 1991:241).

This use of the Simple Present Tense contrasts with the habitual/generic use in that it

describes a particular occurrence of an event . Under the instantaneous reading there is a

telescoping of the interval of time normally associated with the event to a point; what this

actually amounts to is that the situation denoted by the predicate is interpreted as

simultaneous with UT-T. Such sentences include perception and mental Achievements,

performatives, and, according to some grammarians, reportives of the dramatic, sportscaster’s

type (Smith 1991).

The instantaneous present is found in asseverations that use what are known as performative verbs, namely verbs that themselves form part of the activity they report, i.e. the

event announced and the act of announcement are one. It would be more correct to speak of performative sentences, since these verbs behave performatively only under some restrictive

conditions that will be apparent in the sentences below:

(31) (i) I hereby christen this ship ‘Queen Mary’.

(ii) I promise to help you

(iii) I resign.

(iv) I pronounce you man and wife.

(v) I declare the meeting open/adjourned/closed(vi) We accept your offer.

(vii)

I deny the charge.

To utter these sentences is to perform the acts reported by the predicate. Syntactically,

it is characteristic of performative statements to occur in the first person singular/plural and

to permit the insertion of hereby in front of the verb. The temporal characteristic of

performative sentences is straightforward: the utterance time and the event time are

simultaneous, this being part of the conditions on the use of such statements. Another

condition for the felicitous use of these sentences is that ‘the particular persons and

circumstances in a given case must be appropriate for the invocation of the particular procedure involved’ (Austin 1961:34).

Sentences including perception predicates are also used in the Simple Present. In such

cases these predicates are interpreted, aspectually, as achievements. Such sentences constitutereports of instantaneous events, reflecting the special immediacy of perception. Reports of


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mental Achievements are also of the same type. Consider the examples below, borrowed from

C. Smith (1991:153):

(32) (i) I see the moon.

(ii) I feel the current of the river(iii) Oh, I see!

(iv) I understand.(v) Yes, now I remember!

Running commentaries and demonstrations, such as the eyewitness broadcasts of

sportscasters, radio commentators, or reports of conjurors and demonstrators, informal

commentaries with preposed locatives are other instances of the instantaneous use of the

Simple Present:

(33) (i) Napier takes the ball and runs down the wing. He passes the ball to

Attwater. Attwater beats two men, he shoots. It’s a goal!(ii) …he gets it in to Hewlett and he’s fouled immediately by Malnati and…the rebound goes to Joe May.

(iii) Look, I take this card from the pack and place it under the handkerchief –

so.

(iv) I place a bell jar over the candle, and after a few moments the water

gradually rises.

(v) There goes the bus/ Up she goes/Down she falls.

In these cases, the co-extensiveness between the time of utterance and the time of thesituation is subjective rather than objective: the events are presented as simultaneous with the

utterance time even if strictly speaking they are not. The commentaries are restricted to alimited range of contexts where the speaker is specifically assigned the role of commentator.

The dramatic use of Simple Present sentences (also labelled as the ‘timeless’ use or

‘imaginary’ use; grammarians often include this use under the past time value of the Simple

Present) refers to specific completed or terminated events. Such sentences are also

grammatical with an Accomplishment or Activity predicate and have a dramatic flavor. These

dramatic, reportive sentences telescope time. We understand them punctually, as though the

events take only an instant, regardless of their normal duration. The event denoted by the

predicate is described as perfective, but its time is not (directly) related to the speech event.9

This a-temporal status of such sentences require the dramatic interpretation.

Smith (1976:573)) argues that ‘…the reason that a dramatic interpretation is plausibleis that dramatic readings, by definition, have nothing to do with real time. The dramatic

framework gives one license to telescope duration so that completion can take place in a

single point in time’.

As Smith (1991) and Huddleston & Pullum (2002) remark, such statements are found

in certain definable contexts such as a commentary (synopses) on a picture, book, movie,TV

programmes (in sentences introduced by ‘in DP’ where DP refers to a book, a movie), as well

as in the stage directions of play scripts, focus on present existence of works created in the

past, captions in newspapers and to illustrations in books, chronicles of history, recipes.

9 In the previous subchapters we have extensively argued that the perfective interpretation is excluded for

present tense sentences


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Below are some examples (borrowed from different sources: Smith 1991:154,

Stefanescu 1988:253, Giorgi and Pianesi, 1998:153, Huddleston & Pullum 2002: 130) that

instantiate the contexts of use just mentioned:

(34)

(i) Seth and Minnie come forward as far as the lilac clump…She nudgesMinnie with his elbow.. (Eugene O’Neill, Mourning Becomes Electra)

(ii)In ‘Gone with the wind’ Scarlet writes a letter.(iii) In the Brothers Karamazov Dostoevsky draws his characters from the

sources deep in the Russian soil.

(iv) Like Rubens, Watteau is able to convey an impression of warm, living

flesh by the merest whiff of colour.

(v) Aboriginal protesters occupy part of the old Parliament House in Camberra

yesterday .(photographic caption)

(vi) Roman soldiers nail Jesus onto the Cross (description of a painting)

(vi) 1434 Cosimo de Medici begins his family’s control of Florence

1435 Congress Arras: Burgundians withdraw support from England, infavour of France.

When discussing an artist and his surviving work, we can talk about it from the

perspective of their present and potentially permanent existence rather than that of their past

creation. By contrast, when we are concerned with the act of creation itself, then the past tense

is required. Likewise, photographs, newspaper captions, drawings can give a permanence to

what would otherwise be a transient historical occurrence.

A very important remark is in order here. As many linguists and grammarians have

noticed before, sentences without a frequency adverb may receive a specific/existential orgeneric interpretation depending on context and world knowledge.

There are some elements of the linguistic context that may help us distinguish betweenthe two readings: habituality/genericity may be indicated by a bare plural object/subject ,

while an instantaneous reading can be rendered by means of an indefinite or definite

object/subject or by an instantaneous perception verb like ‘ Look ’. Compare the sentences

below:

(35) a) Swallows fly higher than doves (generic)

a) Look, the swallows fly higher than the doves.

a) Carter’s dog chases cars. (habitual)

b) There’s a red car whizzing down the road and Carter’s dog chases it.

a) He scores goals.

b) He scores a goal.

C. Simple Present referring to Past (Historical present)

The Present Tense can also be used in reference to the past. What is past is the time of

the described situation; the Simple Present performs its usual function, namely it places the

UT-T within the AS-T, while EV-T precedes AS-T/UT-T.According to a wide number of grammarians (Huddleston and Pullum, 2002, Leech,

1976, Jespersen, 1933 etc), the ‘historical present’ is best treated as a story-teller’s licence,

whereby past happenings are portrayed or imagined as if they were going on at the present


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time. The Present Tense is used for past time situations in informal conversational narration

or in fiction.

Very often the present tense is accompanied, with apparent incongruity, by an

adverbial indicating past time or it may alternate with a Past Tense form. Consider the

examples below, borrowed from Leech (1976) and Huddleston & Pullum, (2002):

(36) (i) At that moment in comes a messenger from the Head Office, telling me the

boss wants to see me in an hurry.(ii) There was I playing so well even I couldn’t believe it and along comes this

kid and keeps me off the table for three frames.

This use of the simple present tense can be viewed as a metaphorical use, a device

conventionally used (in a wide number of languages, actually) to make the narrative appear

more vivid by assimilating it to the here and now of the speech event.

It is customary for novelists and story-writers to use the Past Tense to describe

imaginary/fictional events. Some writers10

deviate from normal practice and use the Present

in imitation of the popular historical present of spoken narrative. In such cases, transpositioninto the fictional present is a device of dramatic heightening ; it puts the reader in the place ofsomeone actually witnessing the events as they are described. Consider the following excerpt

from Bleak House by Dickens:

(37) Mr Tulkinghorn glances over his spectacles and begins again lower down. My

Lady carelessly and scornfully abstracts her attention. Sir Leicester in a great chair

looks at the fire and appears to have a stately liking for the legal repetitions and

prolixities as ranging among national bulwarks. It happens that the fire is hot where

my Lady sits and that the handscreen is more beautiful than useful, being priceless butsmall.

There are cases when the use of the present tense alternates with the simple past tense.

Poutsma (1926) remarks that shifting from the past to present is often practiced in

picturing a series of incidents and circumstances which is to serve as a background for the

representation of subsequent events. An example would be the following excerpt from

Thackeray’s The Virginians:

(38) His lordship had no sooner disappeared behind the trees of the forest, but Lady

Randolph begins to her confidante the circumstances of her early life. The firstwas she had made a private marriage…..

Declerck (1991:69) notes that, in narratives, the shift of temporal perspective may not

only be from the past to the present but also from the post-present (i.e. future) to the present,

as in the example below:

(39) I can well imagine what will happen. I can see it happen before me: John sets

out his plans, Mary disagrees, they start shouting at each other and in no time

there is a terrible row. I’ve seen it happen often enough to know that it is going to

end like this.

10 Examples of writers employing the present tense in fiction writing would be Camus, Dickens, Thackerey ,

George Elliot, Joyce Cary, Thomas Mann, to mention just a few.


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Some grammarians (e.g. Huddleston&Pullum 2002:131) include here another context in

which the present tense extends into past time territory, namely ‘news headlines’ , spoken or

written, as in the examples in (37) below. The texts beneath the headlines use past tenses but

in headlines the Simple Present is shorter and more vivid. It is considered that this might also

be regarded as a metaphorical extension of the reportive use of the present tense:

(40) (i) UN aid reaches the stricken Bosnian town of Srebrenica

(ii) Trade Unions seek assurances

A different kind of historical present is found with ‘verbs of communication’ as in the

examples below (borrowed from Leech, 1976:7, and Huddleston &Pullum, 2002:131):

(41) (i)The ten o’clock news says that it’s going to be cold.

(ii)I hear we are getting some new neighbours.

(iii)Your correspondent A.D. writes in the issue of February 1st that….

(iv)I gather from Angela that you’re short of money again.

According to Huddleston & Pullum (2002) the use of the Present Tense to report past time

occurrences serves to background the communication occurrences themselves and to

foreground their content, expressed in the subordinate clause. The main clause is assumed to

provide the evidence for believing or entertaining this content. The primary purpose is

therefore to impart this content or to seek confirmation of it. The verbs most commonly used

are: say, tell, inform, hear, gather, understand i.e. verbs referring to the productive or

receptive end of the process of communication Given that the main clause is backgrounded , it

does not contain adjuncts or temporal specification.

D. Present Tense with Future value ( the Futurate ) . The Simple Present may be used to

describe future situations . The fact that the Simple Present still means ‘present’ is renderedclear by the possibility of having different time specifications within he same clause, as the

examples below (42) indicate (H&P 2002:133):

(42) The match now starts next Monday, not Tuesday, as I said in my letter.

The two adjuncts specify different time intervals: now specifies UT-T/AS-T while

next Monday specifies the time of the future situation, i.e. EV-T.The presence of the present tense morpheme has immediate consequences on the

interpretation of the future situation assigning it a high degree of certainty, i.e. it attributes tothe future the same degree of certainty that we normally accord to present or past events

(Leech 1971: 60). This entails that the futurate construction is subject to severe constraints

among which we mention the following:

(i) the presence of future time adverbials,

(ii) the aspectual type of the situation (state predicates are excluded in such

sentences ) and, last but not least

(iii) the future situation is determinable from the state of the world now, that is tosay that the clause must involve something that can be assumed to be known

already in the present.


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In the example above the present tense morpheme and the adverb now give the time of

the arrangement or schedule. It is generally assumed that with the Simple Present the

arrangement is felt to be an impersonal or collective one, made, for example, by a committee,

a court of law or some un-named authority.

The most widely used predicates belong to the class of non-durative event verbs in

particular verbs of directed motion such as go, leave, come, meet , aspectual verbs such asbegin, start, end , etc.

According to grammarians, the most common uses involve :

(i) statements about the calendar or cyclic events,

(ii) scheduled events (regarded as unalterable) and

(iii) subordinate clauses introduced by conditional and adverbial conjunctions.

Consider the examples below borrowed from different sources (Leech 1971,

Huddlestone and Pullum, 2002):

(43) (i) Tomorrow is Sunday./Next Christmas falls on a Thursday/The nexthigh tide is around 4 this afternoon/When is the next full moon?

(ii) The next Kevin Costner film opens at the Eldorado on Saturday./When do the

lectures end this year?/She is president until next May/Her case comes before the

magistrate next week./The Chancellor makes his budget speech tomorrow

afternoon/We start for Istanbul tonight.

(iii) When the spring comes , the swallows will return./Jeeves will announce the guests

as they arrive./If you don’t do better next time you are fired/Either he plays according

to the rules or he doesn’t play at all/I’ll tell you if it hurts.

The set of examples in (43i) reflect the use of the Simple Present for recurrent events

whose time of occurrence can be scientifically calculated, hence it can be included under whatis currently known. By contrast, the simple present is not used for future weather since such

events are not conceived of as being within the domain of what is known (Huddlestone and

Pullum, 2002:132). Weather forecasts are rendered by means of ‘ going to’ or ‘ shall/will’

In (43ii) we have examples that describe situations that have already been arranged ,

scheduled . The element of current schedule or arrangement is seen in the contrast in (44)

below (Huddlestone and Pullum, 2002:132):

(44) (i) Australia meets Sweden in the Davis Cup final in December(ii) ???Australia beats Sweden in the Davis Cup final in December

The sentence in (44i) is quite natural in a context where Australia and Sweden have already

qualified for the final. The use of the Present in (44ii) is unnatural, since the sentence conveys

that the result itself has already been arranged. It is to be noted that subjective certainty is not

enough; knowing the skill, experience and past performances of the team, one might feel

certain about the result of the match but this does not sanction the Simple Present.

The use of the Simple Present in (43iii) is not just a requirement of the syntactic

pattern, but has its base in a contrast of meaning. In the dependent clauses mentioned, the

happening referred to is not a prediction, but a fact that is given. A conditional sentence, forinstance, has the structure ‘If X is a fact, then I predict Y’. (Leech 1971:60). Hence, the use

of the Simple Present with Future value is appropriate to indicate that the consequence of the

condition being fulfilled it is inevitable or already decided, as in (43iii).


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To sum up, the key to the Simple Present with Future value is that it represents

FUTURE AS FACT, that it attributes to the future the same degree of certainty that we

normally accord to present or past events.( Leech 1971:60).

2.2. Simple Past Tense Sentences

The Simple Past Tense (or Preterite, as it is sometimes called), formally represented by the morpheme – ed , is primarily used to express that a situation is located at a past

interval of time, i.e. a time which precedes the Time of Utterance (i.e. UT-T AFTER AS-T/EV-T). Aspectually, the simple past tense sentence is interpreted as perfective (i.e. AS-

T=EV-T)

Dynamic events in the simple past are not as severely constrained as events in the

Simple Present. In the Simple Past the situations described may refer to one particular

occurrence of that situation – an existential reading, or to a series of events of the same type –

a habitual reading . Compare the examples below ( Huddlestone and Pullum, 2002) :

(45) (i) I do ‘The Times” crossword. Present: habitual reading

(ii) I did ‘The Times’ crossword. Past: existential or habitual reading

The interpretation in (45i) as a dynamic/existential situation is ruled out, but such an

interpretation is natural for (45ii) which can refer to a doing of the crossword as readily as to

habitual doing of the crossword.

With the Past Tense, therefore, greater importance attaches to adjuncts and context in

selecting between the two readings. The addition of a locating/deictic adverb like yesterday

induces a dynamic/existential interpretation, while the addition of a frequency adverbial like

regularly or whenever I have the time yields a habitual interpretation.

Sentences including a state predication in the Simple Past Tense (perfectiveaspectually) are flexible in interpretation (depending on context): such sentences may convey

an open interpretation or a closed interpretation. What this means is that the time of theevent/situation need not wholly coincide with AS-T. Consider the example below:

(46) I lived in London.

If we add an expression like ‘in those days’ the interpretation would be that I no

longer live in London, but if we expand it to ‘ I already lived here in London at that time’ we

get an interpretation where I still live in London. This also confirms the importance of

adverbs and context in selecting the intended reading.Traditional grammars have identified different values or uses of the Simple Past tense,

which are given below. A. The Deictic/existential value

As already mentioned, the Simple Past Tense , is primarily used to express that a

situation, viewed as closed, is located at a past interval of time, i.e. a time which precedes the

Time of Utterance. The temporal/aspectual representation is UT-T after AS-T/EV-T.

More often than not this past time interval is explicitly stated by locating or frame

time adverbials (deictic, referential and anaphoric) like: yesterday, last week, two

minutes/days/months ago, at 5 o’clock, at noon, once, when, , which are deictically

interpreted. (i.e. relative to the moment of utterance now). Hence, at the time of utterance, thecontent of the event or state located on the past time axis is recollected . Together with the

tense of the predication, these adverbs contribute to the specification of the AS-T/EV-T.

In this case the Past Tense is used as an absolute tense, and the value or use is knownas the deictic/existential value/use. From an aspectual point of view, the events are viewed as


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perfective (i.e. with the endpoint properties of the situation types). In these contexts the Past

Tense is interpreted as a specific tense with existential value.

Curme (1931:357) remarked that “……if this [tense form] is employed, the time of the

act must be stated accurately or indicated clearly by the context, so that the idea of

indefiniteness or generality is entirely excluded’.

Leech (1976:9) remarks that ‘There are two elements of meaning involved in thecommonest use of the Past Tense. One basic element of meaning is: ‘the happening takes

place before the present moment. This means that the present moment is excluded.[……….].Another element of meaning is:’ the speaker has a definite time in mind. This specific time in

the past is characteristically named by an adverbial expression accompanying the Past Tense

verb.’

As already mentioned time adverbs, locating or otherwise, come in different forms:

PP (at five, in September/1986, on Easter Monday, after/before breakfast), NP/DP ( once, this

Monday/week/month, tomorrow, yesterday, last week), CP (after/before John arrived, when

she left). Consider the examples below:

(47) (i) Haydn was born in 1732.(ii) I thought once he would marry.(iii) I misplaced my glasses a moment ago and can’t find them.

(iv) The glacier moved only about 50 meters during the last century

The aspectual-temporal representation of deictic Past Tense sentences is given in (48)

below. The representation shows that the past tense morpheme orders the UT-.T after AS-T.

Documents

Ileana Baciu-Verbal Categories in English