ABSTRACT
This chapter differs somewhat from the previous two in that I focus on two theoretical analyses of tense: Reichenbach (1947) and Comrie (1985). I show that these models are unnecessarily complex because they conflate tense and aspect properties and do not distinguish
between semantic meaning and conversational pragmatic implicature. I illustrate with examples from English, although I also pull in data from studies of other languages. Chapters 5 and 6 demonstrate how the analysis allows tense properties of English and Greek forms to be sorted out.)
My analysis differs from Reichenbach and Comrie in three main respects: it eliminates the problematic distinction between absolute and relative tense, it allows tense to relate to a C other than ST (speech time), and it assigns the relation between ET and RT to aspect. First, "absolute tense," which appears to predicate a semantic relation between RT and ST, is shown to relate RT and a pragmatically located C. "Relative tense" is shown to be a hybrid category: forms which predicate a CONSISTENT relation between RT and a (potentially variable) C (the ST) are tense, and those which do not are grammatical aspect (e.g. those which predicate a VARIABLE relation between RT and a CONSISTENT C.
