Abstract

By showing that tense references to times can be canonically paraphrased with the devices of predicate logic, this study provides evidence for the Quinean dictum that "to be is to be the value of a variable." ;It is argued that special tense operators, as used in tense logics and Montague grammars, are theoretically superfluous and betray an insensitivity to certain features of the linguistic data. Such alternative logics and formal grammars are compared with the theory of tense reference developed here, and are judged less general, less simple, and less familiar. ;Two analyses of the progressive aspect--those of Goeffrey Leech, and of John Goldsmith and Erich Woisetschlaeger--are examined and criticized. Some characteristics of the use of the progressive aspect are described, but a complete theory is not offered. ;Restrictions governing the co-occurrence of temporal specifiers with the other tense forms are used in the discovery and testing of hypotheses about the structure of each of these forms. ;Criticisms are offered of the views of Arthur Prior and Stephen Braude on deixis in tense reference. It is also argued that the use of dummy predicates to represent the deictic and anaphoric elements of tense reference is both simpler and more adequate than the alternative recommended by Tyler Burge. ;A novel theory of the present perfect is advanced. It is motivated by observations of the co-occurrence, or lack thereof, of certain temporal specifiers with verbs in present perfect form. In turn, this theory explains the vague notions of "current relevance" and "indefinite past," which others have used to distinguish uses of the present perfect from uses of the simple past. ;Besides the standard idioms of predicate logic, the theory utilizes special predicates for 'is a time', 'is a part of', and 'is earlier than', and three metalinguistic dummy predicates. These dummy predicates hold place for identifying descriptions of a verb's base time, predicate satisfaction time, and reference time. Normally, these descriptions are deictically and anaphorically gleaned from the social, physical and linguistic context of utterance. Without these descriptions, a canonical representation of the tense structure of a sentence is incompletely interpreted. Nonetheless, it does exhibit all of the syntactic structure of the tense references in the sentence it represents. ;A Reichenbachian three-point theory of tense reference is adopted with significant modifications. It is shown that Reichenbach's "point of speech" need not be deictically identified and is better relabelled "base time." For additional reasons, Reichenbach's "point of reference" and "point of the event" are relabelled, respectively, "reference time" and "predicate satisfaction time." ;This study utilizes the idioms of first-order predicate logic to represent the referential structure of English verb tenses and of certain features of the progressive aspect. The primary purpose of the study is to explain the uses of each tense on the basis of an analysis of the temporal references characteristic of that tense. The study is intended as a contribution to applied logic, philosophy of logic, and linguistics