A Two-Tiered Analysis of Sequence of Tense in English

Abstract

Unlike languages like Korean, Japanese, and Russian, English uses past tense for the simultaneous reading of a complement clause under a matrix past tense. This phenomenon has been referred to in the literature as Sequence of Tense (SOT). Several authors, including Stowell (1995), have argued that when the main clause has a past time reference, the English past morpheme has two meanings: a simultaneous reading (PRESENT) and a past-shifted reading (PAST). Using the mechanism of a Deictic tense Projection and an Anaphoric Tense Projection. this paper argues that the SOT Rule in languages like English is a syntactic rule that copies the Deictic Tense Projection of the matrix clause into the embedded clause, in order to set up an anaphoric link within the clause boundary. It is also argued that the past morpheme has one meaning, i.e. PAST. For the simultaneous reading, the rule is applied to the complement clause, whereas for the past-shifted reading, it is not. Thus, it is shown that SOT is important mechanism that prevents the ambiguity between a deictic reading (independent interpretation) and an anaphoric reading (dependent interpretation) that exists in non-SOT languages like Japanese and Korean.