Abstract
In conversation, narrative, and other discourse, temporal reference often extends over several sentences. I will be interested in this paper in how extended temporal reference is established and maintained. Most of the discussion focuses on English, but I develop a general account.
Editors’ Note: We thank Barbara Partee for pointing out several typographical errors in the original publication in Rohrer (1980).They have been corrected here. We have also lightly copyedited the original publication, especially for consistency in citation and reference style. In the original, all except the last four references were omitted. To the best of our ability we have tracked down the omitted references and have updated references to then-unpublished sources. Smith was not fully consistent in her use of capitalization in the names she used for different classes of adverbials; we have not made changes to this.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
- 2.
Aspect will not be considered in this paper.
- 3.
- 4.
In this analysis Future is indicated by the combination of present tense and future adverbial; there is no future tense.
- 5.
This example indicates a class of adverbials in which prepositions (at, on, before, etc.) introduce NPs that refer to clock or calendar times (hours, minutes, months, etc.) or to regularly scheduled events that can be taken as indicating a time (breakfast, school, etc.). These adverbials have the relational value of posteriority or anteriority (not both at once).
- 6.
This example indicates a class of adverbials in which prepositions introduce sentences. The sentences may be reduced (John left before Mary) if they contain material repeated in the main sentence.
- 7.
I capitalize temporal interpretation – Past, Future – and use lower-case letters for temporal expressions – e.g. past tense.
- 8.
I ignore here the conditional and irrealis interpretations of past tense.
- 9.
- 10.
See Smith (1977) for discussion of the notion of simplicity in interpretation.
- 11.
Assuming that they refer to identical or compatible units – see Section 3 for discussion.
- 12.
This mode is also known as “erlebte Rede”, and the “style indirecte libre”.
- 13.
The essential ambiguity of indirect speech is emphasized by Lips (1926).
- 14.
- 15.
Auxiliary have indicates anteriority; see Smith (1976).
- 16.
Smith and Whitaker (1979) investigate some different types of ellipsis.
- 17.
Wolfson (1979) discusses the narrative function of switching from past to present tense in accounts of past events.
- 18.
I would like to thank Hermann can Olphen for information about Hindi. The Japanese information is given in Ota (1972).
- 19.
An example of this use of past tense: “The minister will announce at midnight that he burned the documents an hour ago.” On one reading the documents were burned an hour before ST, but on another they will be burned an hour before midnight, and the past tense indicates a time anterior to the RT of the main sentence. Discussion of the limited syntactic contexts for this interpretation is presented in Smith (1981).
- 20.
In the conditional and irrealis uses of past tense, it does not have the absolute interpretation.
- 21.
I present a detailed discussion of this point in Smith (1975) in which I argue against a proposal of McCawley’s (1971) that English tenses be treated as higher verbs, and embedded as part of the general embedding system of English.
- 22.
See McGilvray (1978) for an argument that Reichenbach’s approach to temporal reference captures important points about consciousness and temporal referrer. [Editors’ note: McGilvray (1978) was apparently an unpublished manuscript that is not now available and that is unknown to its author. For a more recent treatment, see McGilvray (1991). Our thanks to James McGilvray for his assistance on this matter.]
- 23.
See Smith (1978).
- 24.
Labov and Waletzky (1967) make a persuasive case that temporal and spatial structures are important in personal narratives. They are less persuasive in their argument that such structures are of general importance in discourse.
- 25.
See Levinson (1979) for an interesting discussion of differences in the structure of different types of linguistic activity.
References
Banfield, A. (1973). Narrative style and the grammar of direct and indirect speech. Foundations of Language, 10, 1–39.
Benveniste, E. (1966). Problèmes de linguistique générale. Paris: Gallimard.
Friedman, N. (1955). Point of view in fiction: The development of a critical concept. PMLA, 70, 1160–1184.
Hamburger, K. (1957). Die Logik der Dichtung. Stuttgart: E. Klett.
Hobbs, J. R. (1976). A computational approach to discourse analysis. Research report 76-2, Department of Computer Science, City University of New York.
Labov, W., & Waletzky, J. (1967). Narrative analysis: oral versions of personal experience. In J. Helm (ed.), Essays on the verbal and visual arts (pp. 12–44). Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Levinson, S. C. (1979). Activity types and language. Linguistics, 17, 365–399.
Lips, M. (1926). Le style indirect libre. Paris: Payot.
McCawley, J. (1971). Tense and time reference in English. In C. J. Fillmore & D. T. Langendoen (eds.), Studies in linguistic semantics (pp. 97–113). New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston.
McGilvray, J. (1991). Tense, reference, and worldmaking. Montreal: McGill-Queen's.
Ota, A. (1972). Comparison of English and Japanese, with special reference to tense and aspect. Studies in English Linguistics. Tokyo: Asahi Press.
Partee, B. H. (1973). Some structural analogies between tenses and pronouns in English. The Journal of Philosophy, 70, 601–609.
Reichenbach, H. (1947). Elements of symbolic logic. New York: Macmillan.
Smith, C. S. (1975). The analysis of tense in English. Texas Linguistic Forum, 1, 71–89.
Smith, C. S. (1976). A theory of auxiliary have in English. Bloomington: Indiana Linguistics Club.
Smith, C. S. (1977). The vagueness of sentences in isolation. Proceedings of the Chicago Linguistic Society. Department of Linguistics, University of Chicago.
Smith, C. S. (1978). The syntax and interpretation of temporal expressions in English. Linguistics and Philosopy, 2, 43–100.
Smith, C. S. (1981). Semantic and syntactic constraints on temporal expressions. In P. Tedeschi. & A. Zaenen (eds.) Syntax and semantics, vol. 14: Tense and aspect (pp. 213–239). New York: Academic Press.
Smith, C. S., & Whitaker, J. T. (1979). Interpreting ellipses in a text. Pragmatics Microfiche.
Stenning, K. (1978). Anaphora as an approach to pragmatics. In M. Halle, J. Bresnan, & G. Miller (eds.), Linguistic theory and psychological reality (pp. 162–200). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Webber, B. (1978). A formal approach to discourse anaphora. Technical Report 3761. Cambridge, MA: Bolt, Beranek and Newman.
Weinrich, H. (1964). Tempus. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer.
Wolfson, Nessa. (1979). The conversational historical present alternation. Language, 55, 168–182.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2009 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Smith, C.S. (2009). Temporal Structures in Discourse. In: Meier, R., Aristar-Dry, H., Destruel, E. (eds) Text, Time, and Context. Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, vol 87. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-2617-0_12
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-2617-0_12
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-90-481-2616-3
Online ISBN: 978-90-481-2617-0
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawSocial Sciences (R0)