Sequence-of-Tense Phenomena in Adjunct Clauses

Abstract

In this chapter, we will consider tense morphemes in adjunct clauses. We will study relative clauses and temporal adverbial clauses. As pointed out in Chapter 3, some traditional grammarians such as Jespersen (1931) discuss the SOT phenomena in terms of the direct speech vs. indirect speech contrast. They analyze the SOT phenomena in terms of a “rule” that relates direct speech to indirect speech. Since adjunct clauses have no “direct speech source,” the possibility that SOT phenomena are found in such clauses would not be considered under such a rule. On the other hand, Curme (1931) characterizes the phenomena in terms of syntactic properties of tense morphemes. Some modern linguists such as Ross (1967), Costa (1972), and Ladusaw (1977) adopt the latter perspective. The SOT rule proposed in Chapter 4 is in fact defined solely in structural terms and is not sensitive to the type of clause in which the target tense morpheme is found. In this chapter, I will apply this structural interpretation of the SOT rule to adjunct clauses and will present supporting evidence for it.KeywordsRelative ClauseMain ClauseIncompleteness TheoremUtterance TimeSpeech TimeThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.