Summary Details
| Query: |
Deictic Reading of an Embedded Tense
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| Author: | Tero Tulenheimo | |
| Submitter Email: | click here to access email | |
| Linguistic LingField(s): |
Pragmatics
Semantics |
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| Summary: |
Please Note: Summaries are typically a compilation of responses to a Query,
but the summary that follows is, this time, regarding a Discussion item, which you can read at: http://linguistlist.org/issues/19/19-609.html Dear all, In this posting I wish to summarize the responses I received to my query 19.609 (''Tense interactions: uniform vs. non-uniform?''). Further, I'd wish to indicate what puzzles me in these responses in view of certain discussions in the literature [1, 2, 3, 4]. I will reformulate the main question of my previous query in a later posting. I'm grateful to Elena Bashir (EB), Julian Bradfield (JB), Damien Hall (DH) and Mike Maxwell (MM) for their responses. (The summary represents my understanding of the responses, and may not represent the views of the people to whom they are ascribed.) SUMMARY My main question was (unfortunately, as it turned out) phrased by reference to the sentences (1) John thought that Harry will leave, (2) John forgot that Mary will come, (3) Mary believed that Harry will be late. (Unfortunately, since the focus of my original query moved to an unintended direction.) As the question was formulated, a prerequisite was finding out whether (1 - 3) are grammatical. Everyone who responded was a native speaker. Some considered these sentences plainly ungrammatical, others expressed reservations. Everyone agreed that what (1 - 3) attempt to express is best expressed in standard English by replacing ''will'' by ''would'': no one suggested that these sentences could have a reading expressing something different from the result of such substitution. (In particular, only one person, and with much hesitation, was prepared to interpret the embedded ''will'' deictically in a suitable context; still this person said he would not personally go for using ''will'' in that way.) DH said that in the UK, (1 - 3) would definitely be ungrammatical but, in his judgment, in the US sentences like (1 - 3) are sometimes or even often considered grammatical. JB said the sentences are ungrammatical in standard English but might not be considered ungrammatical in suitable contexts. And MM said he would not consider the sentences strictly ungrammatical, while he still would not choose to use such sentences, but would replace ''will'' by ''would'' instead. EB characterized the need for replacing ''will'' by ''would'' by saying that in English ''the reported perceived event is treated as though the perceiver shares the same temporal perspective as the reporter,'' pointing out that in other languages, e.g. Urdu, ''the action in the embedded clause is viewed from the temporal stance of the perceiver at the time of perception''; this would then fit the pattern of (1 - 3), insofar as the syntax is concerned. That is, what in English is expressed by the grammatical sentence (1a) John thought that Harry would leave, would be expressed in Urdu by a sentence where there indeed appears the equivalent of ''will leave'' in the embedded clause. The action in the embedded clause (leaving) is viewed from the perspective of the perceiver (John) at the time of his perception (thinking): John would have used the equivalent of ''Harry will leave'' to express what he then thought. It may be worth pointing out that this analysis of (1) is diametrically opposed to the analysis attempting to construe ''will'' deictically. For, the reading of (1) construing ''will'' deictically, uttered at t_0, would state that what John thought in the past was that Harry leaves after t_0. Hence (or so it seems) it is the person perceiving who happened to have, according to the report (1), the rather strangely specified belief in the past that there is a time (t_1) later than that of reporting (t_0) such that John leaves at t_1. The embedded clause is not viewed from the temporal stance of the perceiver at the time of perception, but the content of the perception is determined relative to the temporal stance of the reporter! QUESTION: DEICTIC READING OF AN EMBEDDED TENSE But can sentences such as (1 - 3) actually carry a reading where ''will'' -- or more generally, the tense of the embedded clause -- appears as deictic? The fact that no one who replied to my query found these sentences unproblematically grammatical seems to me to suggest that there is no such uncontroversial reading. Yet in the literature several authors seem to take it for granted that there is one. Here is a list of sentences discussed in the literature and claimed to have a reading (apparently unproblematic, for that matter) which would be destroyed by turning ''will'' into ''would'' or ''is'' into ''was'' [or ''ran'' into ''had run'' in (3.4)]. Sentence of the form (x.n) is from the reference [x]: (1.1) John said that he will leave tomorrow (p. 115) (1.2) John said that he will leave before Jane returns (ibid.) (1.3) John said that he is ill (ibid.) (2.1) John heard that Mary is pregnant (p. 636) (2.2) We found out that John loves Mary (ibid.) (3.1) John said that Harry will leave (p. 120) (3.2) John said that Harry is leaving (ibid.) (3.3) John heard that Mary is pregnant (ibid.) (3.4) John thought that Harry ran (ibid.) (4.1) It was predicted that the Messiah will come (p. 496) Comrie [1:114-5] says e.g. of (1.3) that it is applicable when what John said is considered by the reporter to still have relevance/continued validity. He explains (1.2) by saying it has the implication that John's leaving and Jane's return are possible future events. Enç [2:636] says of (2.1) that unlike ''John heard that Mary was pregnant'', the sentence (2.1) must be interpreted evaluating ''is'' relative to the time of utterance. She argues that via this analysis Comrie's idea of 'present relevance' can be made more precise. Hornstein explains (3:121) that in all of (3.1 - 3.4), the event time of the embedded clause is interpreted temporally relative to the utterance time, whereby these sentences have an interpretation altogether different from the sentences with ''would'' in place of ''will'' (in which ''would'' appears in an embedded clause with a sequence-of-tense reading). Hornstein is very explicit about his interpretation. He goes so far as to say e.g.: ''[W]hat John heard was that Mary was with child at the moment of utterance of [(3.3)] as a whole. If John's information is accurate, then Mary is still pregnant.'' Kamp & Reyle [4:497] explain that unlike the sentence ''It was predicted that the Messiah would come,'' sentence (4.1) reports a past prediction about an event lying in the future of the time at which (4.1) is asserted, not about an event that lies in the future of the time of the prediction but might have taken place before the time of assertion. As to truth-conditions of sentences with deictically interpreted embedded tense, MM pointed out to me in his response to me that (4.1) ''makes it sound like the prediction, which was made let's say in 500 BC, was that the Messiah would come after the year 2008 AD. That's of course a possible prediction, just rather odd.'' Perhaps such an odd character of the truth-condition is the reason why the suggestion, according to which there is a systematic possibility (or even necessity) of deictically interpreting a suitable embedded tense (such as that of ''is'' or ''will''), does not gain spontaneous support among native speakers. Apparently, it seems to me, the best way of making sense of the availability of such systematic readings is to say that they arise from the utterer maximizing the information given by his/her report, by appropriately relating the event time of the embedded clause to the time of utterance. (Hence if the utterer X wishes to convey that in past, John said ''Harry will leave'' and X furthermore is aware that Harry hasn't left as yet, then by uttering (3.1) with ''will'' interpreted deictically, X states what in the circumstances of the utterance more accurately describes what John said than would the utterance of the sentence ''John said that Harry would leave''; the expression of the truth-condition is so to say updated.) Given that various linguists have apparently taken deictic reading of an embedded tense as being a genuinely possible reading -- and accordingly, have not considered (1.1 - 4.1) as unsuccessful attempts at stating what rather should be stated using a form adapted to sequence-of-tense -- I'm puzzled by the fact that no one who responded to my query naturally considered the deictic reading of the relevant sentences but rather chose to propose replacing ''will'' by ''would.'' Not being a native speaker, I'm not able to properly figure out what is at stake. I'd be grateful for any clarifications. Kind regards, Tero Tulenheimo University of Helsinki [1] B. Comrie: Tense, Cambridge University Press, 1985. [2] M. Enç: ''Anchoring Conditions for Tense,'' Ling. Inq. 18(4):633-657, 1987. [3] N. Hornstein: As Time Goes By. Tense and Universal Grammar, The MIT Press, 1990. [4] H. Kamp & U. Reyle: From Discourse to Logic, Part 2, Kluwer, 1993. |
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| LL Issue: | 19.1264 | |
| Date Posted: | 14-Apr-2008 | |
| Original Query: | Read original query | |
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