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For the most part, these verb tenses are easy to handle and need not be discussed. Yet one of the temporal relationships suggested here does cause disproportionate difficulty: the attempt to express the future from the point of view of the past, especially when one is explaining hypotheses made when the experiment was originally designed. Because descriptions of experiments are present narratives about past events, the subjects, apparatus, stimuli, and procedure are described in the past tense: The subjects were 24 undergraduate students; the stimuli were presented on a black and white video monitor; the subjects were asked to respond by pressing a microswitch; and so forth. But the presentation of past hypotheses is another matter, as the following sentence illustrates: If

subjects should reinstate antecedents, they would be able to name a reinstated antecedent faster than a nonreinstated antecedent. In itself this sentence does not suggest a hypothesis about the future stated from the point of view of the past at all; instead, it suggests a subjunctive idea-namely, that if one thing should happen, another would be the case. Indeed the preceding example can only express the future as viewed from time past if it is put into indirect discourse, thus: On the basis of the model, we assumed that if subjects should reinstate antecedents, they would be able to name a reinstated antecedent faster than a nonreinstated antecedent. Because the past tense forms of shall and will in English are also the forms that are used for the subjunctive, only a preceding statement in the past indicative can clarify their use in expressions of futurity from the point of view of the past.