29th European Summer School in Logic, Language, and Information
University of Toulouse (France), 17-28 July, 2017

Theories of sequence-of-tense

Sam Alxatib, Yael Sharvit

Language and Logic (Advanced)

Second week, from 17:00 to 18:30

Abstract

The course is concerned with Sequence-of-Tense phenomena and focuses specifically on `non-past', aka `fake', uses of morphological past in various constructions. We see two main challenges that are presented by these uses. First, not all constructions that allow fake past obey the same constraints; some require fake past to co-occur with a stative predicate, others don't. Second, not all languages allow fake past in the same constructions; many languages that allow fake past in antecedents of conditionals do not allow it in the scope of attitude verbs. Theories will be surveyed and critiqued with respect how they address various aspects of the challenge.