Abstract
Languages that allows a vacuous past tense morpheme in complement clauses of attitude verbs are referred to as SOT (sequence-of-tense) languages, and languages that do not are referred to as non-SOT languages. This squib observes that quite generally, if in a given language the present tense morpheme obligatorily refers to the utterance time in present-under-past sentences, that language allows a vacuous past. The author shows that in order to account for this correlation, any theory of SOT has to be supplemented with a principle of Universal Grammar that requires every well-formed matrix sentence to be embeddable under a propositional attitude verb. He calls this principle the Embeddability Principle
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