Why is 'then' incompatible with the present?
Anastasia Tsilia, Zhuoye Zhao
September 2024 

The temporal adverbial 'then' is cross-linguistically incompatible with the present tense, not only in matrix but also in embedded clauses. In languages such as Modern Greek, Russian, Modern Hebrew, and Japanese, where the present tense can shift referring to the ‘now’ of the attitude holder rather than the time of the utterance, then remains incompatible with the present, even though the latter denotes a time in the past or future (Ogihara & Sharvit 2012, Sharvit 2018, Vostrikova 2018, Tsilia 2021). Additionally, in Modern Greek, 'then' is at the same time compatible with a deleted past (Abusch 1997), which is interpreted as a present from the point of view of the attitude holder (Tsilia 2022). Thus, 'then' is incompatible with the shifted present, but compatible with the deleted past in the same language, suggesting that the two are not semantically equivalent. We introduce a new interpretation parameter, which we call ‘temporal perspective’. The interpretation of tenses and of 'then' is sensitive to the temporal perspective. Tense shift is a result of the shift of the perspective, and the incompatibility between 'then' and the present is derived as a shift together effect (Anand & Nevins 2004, Sudo 2012, Deal 2020). On the other hand, the deleted past is assumed to be stripped of its perspective sensitivity, and therefore does not clash with 'then'. We also provide empirical support for distinguishing the perspective from the context and the evaluation index.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/008398 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	To appear in Proceedings of the 42nd West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL)
keywords:	then, temporal adverbials, shifted tense, deleted tense, sequence of tense, shift together, tense semantics, temporal perspective, interpretation parameters, semantics
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