III. Futurish forms other than be going to 357 [A word about weeds and mulching. Weeding is therapeutic to some, a real bore to others, but] it has to be done if you are to stay in control of your garden, rather than the other way round. (www) [The Protestant marching season coincides with the preparations for elections to Northern Ireland’s peace convention.] If Ulster is to avoid a descent into communal violence then a mixture of delicacy and resolution will be required to maintain public order and sustain political progress. (www) If we are to be effective and authentic, Oxfam staff, volunteers and supporters must function as an integrated movement. (www) 7.16 The present tense Both the progressive and the nonprogressive present tense can under certain conditions be used to talk about a situation whose post-present actualization is dependent on present circumstances: The new teacher arrives tomorrow. We’re leaving in a minute. This use of the present tense, which represents a shift of temporal perspective, is treated in detail in 3.8Ϫ10. 358 7. Absolute tense forms referring to the post-present IV. Summary 7.17.1 The meaning of the future tense is: ‘ The situation time is located in the post-present zone’. The principal future tense form in English is ‘will (or shall) ϩ present infinitive’. (Shall is only ever used in the first person and then only in restricted grammatical and pragmatic contexts). An alternative future tense form is ‘be going to ϩ present infinitive’, which, however, can also be used as a ‘futurish’ form Ϫ see 7.17.2. The progressive future tense can be used without progressive meaning to express ‘future as a matter of course’: [Their centre forward is limping. I expect that] his substitute will be playing the second half. 7.17.2 Unlike future tense forms, ‘futurish forms’ always combine some sort of reference to the present with the location of a situation time in the post- present zone. Because the location of a situation time in the future is not the main meaning of these forms (reference to the present is at least as important and in some cases is the core temporal meaning) they are not future tenses, but they do establish post-present domains. The form be going to is not only used as future tense form but also, and more usually, as a futurish form. The dividing line between the two uses is not a clear one, but in cases in which be going to refers to the future more or less devoid of reference to the present, we consider it to be a future tense form. As a futurish form, be going to expresses the idea that the post-present actualization of a situation is predictable from present circumstances. That is, the source or cause of the actualization of the future situation is already pres- ent. The present ‘roots’ of the future situation may lie in an intention: She’s going to wash the elephant means ‘she has the intention of washing the ele- phant’. The future situation may also have its roots in any other sort of present circumstances that can be used as evidence for a prediction. For example, The elephant is going to be sick implies ‘The elephant is showing signs that I recog- nize as evidence that it will shortly be sick’. Unlike will, which normally re- quires that there be a contextual temporal anchor for the situation referred to, be going to can be used without such an anchor. The observation that will normally requires a temporal anchor explains why it is hardly possible in examples like the following: [Be careful!] The bathtub {is going to / ?? will} overflow. (For lack of an indication of time, will strongly suggests that there is a condition missing.) Because will (and shall) in their use as future tense auxiliaries simply locate a situation at some unspecified time in the future, it can be difficult to interpret a clause with a future tense form with will if there is no indication of where IV. Summary 359 in the future the situation lies. Thus Be careful, the bathtub will overflow! tends to provoke the reaction ‘when?’ or, more likely, ‘if what?’, since conditions are often left implicit and one of the most characteristic uses of the will future is in sentences with a conditional meaning or connotation. In such sentences, the post-present situation does not have to be located at any particular point in the future, but is simply presented as logically posterior to the situation in the if-clause (or the equivalent, in sentences with a conditional connotation). 7.17.3 However, be going to can also be argued to function at times as a future tense form, since it is sometimes used to refer to the future actualization of a situation with little attention to the present roots of that situation: The concert is going to be held in the open air. In such cases, we treat be going to as a future tense auxiliary. Be going to as a future tense auxiliary can also be argued to be even more ‘neutral’ than will as a future tense auxiliary, since it lacks the subjective element present in the prediction meaning of will. Nevertheless, since be going to retains some sense of the situation’s having its roots in the present, its use implies that the conditions for the actualization of the situation have been met at speech time. This means that it does not normally combine with a conditional clause which refers to a condition that has yet to be met. In such cases, will is normally used. Thus be going to is somewhat difficult to interpret in the following example: If your dog bites a post office worker, the post office {will / ?? is going to} sue you. Similarly, in If that dog bites him he’ll sue, the speaker simply makes a predic- tion about a future situation that will actualize if a future condition is met. However, in If that dog bites him he’s going to sue, the meaning is either ‘He has already decided that he is going to sue if the dog bites him’ Ϫ i. e. the conditions for his suing if the dog bites him have already been met Ϫ or some- thing like ‘I can see that he’s the type to sue if the dog bites him’ Ϫ i. e., again, the conditions for his suing if the dog bites him Ϫ namely his being the type to do so Ϫ are already there’. 7.17.4 Will and shall also have uses as modal auxiliaries expressing volition. For example Shall I help you? inquires about the addressee’s wishes and I won’t help him expresses unwillingness or refusal on the speaker’s part. As tense auxiliaries, will and shall simply locate a situation in the post-present, albeit with varying degrees of subjectivity. (In 2.8.2 we have distinguished between pure future, prediction and predictability.) They do not have connotations of present factors that affect the actualization of the future situation, such as those found in the use of futurish forms or modal forms. The ‘neutral predic- tion’ value of will and shall as tense auxiliaries is most evident when the post- present actualization of the predicted situation is dependent on factors that are external to the subject referent of the future tense clause: If that dog barks 360 7. Absolute tense forms referring to the post-present much more the neighbours will complain. In certain contexts, the modal mean- ing of will or of shall is particularly salient. In those contexts, the speaker wishing to express pure future time reference has to find an alternative form. 7.17.5 The futurish forms other than be going to include ‘be about to ϩ present infinitive’ and ‘be on the point of ϩ present gerund’ for immediate future and be to for (externally imposed) arranged future. In addition, both the progressive present tense and the nonprogressive present tense can be used to refer to the future by treating it as if it were the present, as in The new helper arrives this afternoon. (This ‘shift of temporal perspective’ use of the present tense is addressed in 3.6). 8. Temporal domains and relative tenses: theoretical foundations I. Introduction 364 8.1 Full situation vs predicated situation 364 8.2 Orientation time & situation time 367 8.3 Temporal relations expressed by tenses: T-relations 368 8.4 Temporal relations not expressed by tenses: W-relations 369 8.5 The two ‘time-spheres’ 370 8.6 Present time-sphere zones 370 8.7 Visual representation of time-spheres and zones 371 8.8 Absolute zones 371 8.9 The length of the time-spheres and zones 372 8.10 Absolute vs relative tenses 372 8.11 Temporal domain 372 8.12 Two past tenses: the absolute preterite vs the relative preterite 373 8.13 Past vs present (time-sphere) tenses 374 8.14 Temporal subordination or temporal binding (T-binding) 374 II. Temporal domains: further terminological apparatus 376 8.15 Central time of orientation (central orientation time) 376 8.16 The temporal nature of the domain 377 8.17 The definition of T-simultaneity 377 8.18 The definition of W-simultaneity 378 8.19 Temporal subordination vs syntactic subordination 380 8.20 Definition of ‘head clause’ and ‘matrix’ 380 8.21 Shift of domain 381 8.22 Shift of temporal perspective 382 III. Arguments for distinguishing between the absolute and the relative past tense 383 8.23 Argument 1: similarity between past and post-present domains 384 8.24 Argument 2: past tenses whose situation time is W-posterior to t 0 385 8.25 Argument 3: tense use in represented speech 390 8.26 Argument 4: the incompatibility of a punctual adverbial with a relative preterite 398 8.27 Argument 5: a relative past tense form cannot be replaced by used to 402 8.28 Argument 6: the use of the preterite rather than the conditional tense 405 8.29 Argument 7: ambiguity or vagueness? 408 8.30 Argument 8: choosing between the progressive and the nonprogressive form 412 8.31 Argument 9: T-simultaneity is a unidirectional relation 414 8.32 Argument 10: the Dutch test 416 362 8. Temporal domains and relative tenses: theoretical foundations IV. Theoretical conclusions from these arguments 419 8.33 Theoretical conclusion 1 419 8.34 Theoretical conclusion 2 420 8.35 Theoretical conclusion 3 421 8.36 Theoretical conclusion 4 422 8.37 Theoretical conclusion 5 424 8.38 Theoretical conclusion 6 425 8.39 Theoretical conclusion 7 426 V. The principle of unmarked temporal interpretation 427 8.40 Introduction 427 8.41 The ‘Principle of Unmarked Temporal Interpretation’ 427 VI. Summary of chapter 8 434 8.42 Terminology 434 8.43 Evidence for the existence of two past tenses 435 8.44 Further theoretical conclusions 437 8.45 The role of (non)boundedness in the unmarked temporal interpretation of situations 438 Abstract 363 Abstract In the previous chapters we provided an over- view of the four absolute tenses in English: the present tense, the past tense (or preterite), the present perfect tense and the future tense (which we discussed together with ‘futurish tense forms’). The current chapter deals with the no- tion of ‘temporal domain’, which is established by an absolute tense form and which can be ex- panded by one or more relative tense forms. For example, in the sentence Mary told me she felt sick, the first past tense form (told) is an abso- lute tense form, establishing a past domain, while the second past tense form (felt) is a rela- tive one, representing the situation of feeling sick as simultaneous with the telling. In part I (ϭ sections 8.1Ϫ8.14) we first reca- pitulate (and in some cases further develop) some of the key concepts we introduced in chap- ter 2. We begin by stressing the difference be- tween ‘full situation’ and ‘predicated situation’. For instance, in the example above, the full situ- ation of Mary feeling sick takes up a longer por- tion of time than the predicated situation, which is ‘temporally bound’ by (more specifically, rep- resented as T-simultaneous with) the virtually punctual situation of telling and whose duration is thus confined to the time taken up by the tell- ing situation (since T-simultaneity is defined as coincidence). Part II (ϭ sections 8.15Ϫ8.22) lays out the ad- ditional conceptual machinery we need to talk about temporal domains, such as ‘central time of orientation’, ‘T-simultaneity’, ‘W-simultane- ity’, ‘head clause’, ‘matrix’, ‘shift of domain’ and ‘shift of temporal perspective’. In part III (ϭ sections 8.23Ϫ8.32) we adduce no fewer than ten arguments in support of the claim that there exist two distinct past tenses in English, viz. the ‘absolute past tense’ and the ‘relative past tense’. The most decisive argument is based on the observation that a past tense form can be used to refer to a situation that lies in the future rather than in the past, as shown by the last verb form (felt)inMary told me on the phone last night that at the dinner party to- morrow she would suddenly say that she felt sick. This means that not all past tense forms locate a situation in the past. An absolute past tense form does, but a relative past tense form just expresses coincidence between two times in a past domain and can therefore be used even if the two times are interpreted as lying in the fu- ture, as in the above example. In part IV (ϭ sections 8.33Ϫ8.39) we draw a number of theoretical conclusions based on the arguments adduced in the preceding part. Among other issues, we take a stance with re- spect to the question whether we are dealing with two past tenses being homophonous or with a single past tense morpheme with ambigu- ous meaning. Part V (ϭ sections 8.40Ϫ8.41) is devoted to default principles guiding the interpretation of temporal relationships between consecutive clauses with absolute tense forms. We show how, in the absence of any direct linguistic clues as to the temporal relations holding between the situations, the (non)boundedness of the situa- tions involved is of central importance. For ex- ample, the bounded situations in John went to the door and knocked three times are interpre- ted in terms of temporal succession, whereas the nonbounded situations in John stood by the window and enjoyed the scenery are interpreted in terms of temporal coincidence. Part VI provides a summary of chapter 8. . Because the location of a situation time in the future is not the main meaning of these forms (reference to the present is at least as important and in some cases is the core temporal meaning) they. That is, the source or cause of the actualization of the future situation is already pres- ent. The present ‘roots’ of the future situation may lie in an intention: She’s going to wash the elephant. lying in the fu- ture, as in the above example. In part IV (ϭ sections 8.33Ϫ8.39) we draw a number of theoretical conclusions based on the arguments adduced in the preceding part. Among other issues,