Temporal interpretations of sentences with complement clauses

Abstract

This work concerns temporal interpretations in those sentences with complement clauses. A central fact about temporal reference is that it involves orientation or anchoring to some time. Many temporal expressions (such as tense, time adverbials) are not interpretable if one does not know how they are anchored. How to identify the anchor (i.e., the antecedent of temporal anaphora, or temporal antecedent) is important especially in the sentences that describe multiple events. The authors present an extension of tense theory to accommodate the sequence-of-tense (SOT) phenomena and propose an identification method for temporal antecedent. Then according to the temporal antecedent, the temporal meaning for the verb form of a complement clause can be assigned and its interpretation is accurately obtained.