The interaction of various temporal devices in the use of past followed by temporal nouns

Abstract

Followed by a temporal noun, past can be synonymous with last, but not with non-deictically anchored previous (e.g., ‘I've not been feeling very well for the past/last/*previous few days’). Most dictionaries provide examples in which past occurs with the present perfect, giving the impression that past is incompatible with other tenses. A close examination of the token past retrieved from the Brown Corpus, the Frown Corpus, and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (coca), however, has revealed that it is not uncommon for past to occur with the simple past or even with the past perfect (e.g., ‘His wife had left him the past year for a wealthy Wall Street broker’) and that past occurring with the past perfect can be explained as instances of free indirect style, discourse freezing or difference in reality (i.e., the three discourse principles allowing a shift in viewpoint with last). Research on temporal reference has thus far been ‘strongly biased towards certain devices’ such as tense, Aktionsart, and aspect ( Klein, 2009 : 41). This study shows that our understanding of how time is encoded in language can benefit from research studies dealing with the relationship between tense-aspect, temporal adverbials and discourse principles.