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Binary tense and modality

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Abstract

The present paper adopts as its point of departure the claim by Te Winkel (1866) and Verkuyl (2008) that mental temporal representations are built on the basis of three binary oppositions: Present/Past, Synchronous/Posterior and Imperfect/Perfect. Te Winkel took the second opposition in terms of the absence or presence of a temporal auxiliary zullen ‘will’. However, in a binary system Future loses the status it has in a ternary analysis as being at the same level as Past and Present. The present paper shows that Present and Past already may express posterior information, there being no temporal role for zullen ‘will’. Grice’s Maxim of Quantity determines which sort of interpretation (current or posterior) is to be associated with Present or Past. The infinitival form of zullen ‘will’ should be seen as an epistemic modal operator with a specific role in the interaction between speaker and hearer. This operator will be argued to be positioned between the first and the third opposition. The binary approach is not restricted to Dutch and so it points to a fundamental flaw in Kissine (2008) which proposed that the English auxiliary will is (only) temporal.

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Notes

  1. This has been proposed for English will and shall (e.g., Palmer 1974; Hornby 1975; Comrie 1985; Hornstein 1990); for German werden (e.g., Saltveit 1962; Dieling 1982; Ballweg 1988) and for Dutch zullen (e.g., Den Hertog 1903; Haeseryn et al. 1997).

  2. Dutch: Paardekooper (1957), Droste (1958), Kirsner (1969), Janssen (1988); German: Vater (1975), Erb (2001); English: Quirk and Greenbaum (1973), Huddleston and Pullum (1975), Palmer (2001), Stowell (2012), among others. The literature on German werden suggests that this verb comes close to Dutch zullen (cf. Janssen 1989).

  3. Verkuyl (2008) discusses in detail the tense systems of languages such as French, Chinese, Bulgarian, Georgian and English, arguing that the three binary oppositions occur in each of them albeit in different choices made by the languages in question.

  4. The italicized labels in the cells of Table 1 are the ones that we will use in this study for the eight tense forms occurring in Dutch even though the terms used for the four posterior forms will turn out to be less felicitous due to our claim that zullen ‘will’ does not belong to the temporal system.

  5. Jespersen (1924:258f.) discusses the notion of present time along the same line but there is a crucial difference. Jespersen considers the present in sentences like (4) and (5) as an extension of the present ‘now’, which it is not in the binary system under discussion: n partitions the present domain i.

  6. The binary analysis solves the problem for Lekakou and Nilsen (2008) raised by the principle proposed in Giorgi and Pianesi (1997) which says that a closed event may not be simultaneous with a punctual event. Lekakou and Nilsen take n as the present and so the Giorgi/Pianesi-principle excludes the Present Perfect from pertaining to n. By separating the notion of present from the notion of shifting point, the binary approach does not have any problem in (14) with locating k in i a up to and including n.

  7. One of the few to discuss a present tensed form of a modal auxiliary in terms of tense morphology is Sarkar (1998:92f). See also Kirsner (1969:119f); Janssen (1988:119).

  8. It is not possible to render the present tensed sentence Vrijdag is ze klaar in (3d) into the past sentence Vrijdag was ze klaar in (18d′) without losing its posterior sense. It is a factual statement about the past with no posteriority expressed. However, it suffices to add dan ‘then’ to obtain the posterior: Vrijdag was ze dan klaar (lit: Friday she was then ready) may pertain to an expectation expressed at n′.

  9. The type-logical conventions are borrowed from Verkuyl (2008). For example, the post-operator introduced in the fourth line of (32) is of type 〈〈i,t〉,〈i,t〉〉, taking the formula of type 〈i,t〉 in the third line in order to yield an expression of type 〈i,t〉 in the fifth line, where i is the type of indices. This representation is close to event-semantics but the indices i, j and k are all taken as numbers standing for temporal units, much in the way in which 23 in March 23 stands for a natural day. Thus, k corresponds closely to the e of event semantics, but the representation in (32) abstracts from ontological (naive physical) considerations. Hence the possibility of using ≺ for the relation ‘earlier than but contained in’ much in the way in which 3 precedes 4 but is also included in 4. ∃!i is short for: ∃i′ [i′=i…] along the lines of Blackburn (1994) discussed earlier. The present analysis remains neutral with regard to a presuppositional or assertive approach to tense.

  10. This places our research in a tradition in which Kratzer (1991a, 1991b), Enç (1996), Zimmermann (2000), Condoravdi (2002), Geurts (2005), Kissine (2008), Sarkar (1998), Nauze (2008) among many others are guided by the seminal work by Kripke (1963) and Lewis (1979) and made available technically in works like Hughes and Cresswell (1968), Thomason (1984), Gabbay and Guenthner (1984:Vol. II).

  11. Metaphysical modality plays no role in our analysis except as the background for all more specific sorts of modality. Only if different sorts of modality need to be kept apart, will we use the three terms or subscripts available.

  12. The rather informal notation of Enç is adapted to our notation. \(\mbox {$ [ \! [ \alpha ] \! ]$}_{\langle w,n\rangle} = 1\) means that α is true given a pair 〈w,n〉, which indicates that w is a world with a history in which n is a time. The variable t ranges over times taken as intervals.

  13. Kissine’s verb come is replaced here to evade the implicit deixis of this verb as well as it implicit appeal to its being actualized in the future, sing being a more neutral alternative.

  14. Apart from that it is also puzzling why (39b) has ‘not all w’ (∼ there is a w′) as the negation of ‘all w′’ rather than ‘no w′’. In other words, why does Kissine choose here the external negation of the all-quantifier rather than internal negation as it would be in the line of Enç?

  15. The literature on generalized quantification is abundant. We restrict ourselves here to Keenan and Westerståhl (1997); Peters and Westerståhl (2006).

  16. As observed earlier, Mischa moest spelen (Mischa past + must play) and Dat huis op de hoek stortte in ‘That house at the corner collapsed’ are less suitable for a posterior interpretation because Dutch prefers to use Mischa zou moeten spelen (lit: Mischa would must play) and Dat huis op de hoek zou instorten ‘That house at the corner would collapse.’

  17. In spoken language, it often happens that speakers will utter (57a) or (57b), but they are always prepared to admit that what they just said has an air of saying it twice or of strengthening the modal content.

  18. Iatridou and Zeijlstra (2010) observe that the deontic moeten ‘must’ scopes over negation as in Mischa moet niet spelen (‘Mischa must not play’). They explain this by assuming that must is a positive polarity item. We are not sure whether this carries over to the epistemic modal zullen ‘will’.

  19. It is interesting to see that the addition of niet ‘not’ to (59c) neutralizes as it were the difference between a current and posterior interpretation: collapsing is easier to locate as an eventuality either in i a or in i ◊ than not collapsing as a non-event. This leads to a sort of neutrality with respect to where to locate k.

  20. For example, in his discussion of the Chinese tense system Verkuyl (2008:162–179) suggests that the syn/post-opposition may occur in order to compensate for the absence of an (overt) pres/past-opposition.

  21. This is in line with Abusch (1997), Von Stechow (1995), Condoravdi (2002), Vincent (2010), among others.

  22. Condoravdi (2002:71) defines it as “a function, fixed by the context of use, from world-time pairs to sets of worlds,” namely those worlds compatible with the knowledge of the speaker.

  23. The distinction made by Condoravdi (2002) between stative and eventive predicates seems to be a different one than between durative and terminative. In terms of the well-known tripartition between aspectual classes—States, Processes and Events—Condoravdi seems to make an opposition between States on the one hand, and Processes + Events on the other. Unfortunately she uses the verb get in demonstrating her point. Thus get sick is opposed to be sick.

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Acknowledgements

We have profited very much from Frank Veltman and Hedde Zeijlstra for very valuable discussions and feedback on versions presented to them. We also are grateful for the detailed and constructive remarks of the two reviewers on the prefinal version. We thank Andrei Stoevsky for his detailed criticism of that version. We would like to thank Johan van Benthem, Marcel den Dikken and Jan Wouter Zwart for their reactions on the consequences of doing away with temporal zullen ‘will’. We would like to thank audiences at the universities in Amsterdam (Meertens), Antwerp, Budapest, Groningen and Utrecht (UIL OTS). All responsibility for the present version is ours.

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  1. Meertens Institute/Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, P.O.-box 94264, 1090 GG, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Hans Broekhuis

  2. Utrecht Institute of Linguistics OTS, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Henk J. Verkuyl

  3. De Lairessestraat 163hs, 1075 HK, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Henk J. Verkuyl

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Broekhuis, H., Verkuyl, H.J. Binary tense and modality. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 32, 973–1009 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-013-9213-9

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