The features of tense in English

• Main Author: Cowper, Elizabeth
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Department of Linguistics, University of Toronto 1995
• Subjects: Tense; Inflection; Realis Mood; Irrealis Mood; Binding; Dogrib
• Online Access: https://twpl.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/twpl/article/view/6325

This paper proposes lexical entries for the seven inflectional morphemes that can head English tense phrases. Following Johns' (1992) One Form/One Meaning Principle, and Cowper's (1995) Strong Monosemy Principle, a single lexical representation is proposed for each morpheme, and the various interpretations of sentences containing these morphemes follow compositionally, once the roles of other elements in the sentence and in the discourse context are properly understood. The various tense morphemes are shown to fall into the three classes defined by standard (Chomsky 1981) Binding Theory, with temporal anaphors, temporal pronominals and temporal R-expressions all playing a role. Finiteness is shown to be simply a matter of subject case licensing, and pastness is argued to constitute merely a marked form of coindexing, similar to that proposed by Saxon (1984) for disjoint anaphors in Dogrib. Sequence of tense phenomena follow straightforwardly from the binding properties of the present and past tense morphemes.