Tense, Attitudes, and Scope

This volume is a model-theoretic inquiry into the semantics of tense in natural language. It presents the view that the semantic contribution of tense is made in relation to structurally higher expressions (so-called relative tense) and argues against the view that tenses are all indexicals. This idea is formally encoded as a "de se" analysis of attitudes, originally proposed by Lewis, coupled with a sequence-of-tense rule posited for English. An auxiliary proposal is made to account for some exceptional cases (such as so-called double-access sentences) which invoke "de re" attitudes about temporal entities (states or intervals). Since the proposed account assumes that the interpretation of tense is structure-dependent, it also correctly predicts scope interactions between tenses and NPs. This book is intended for scholars and graduate students in formal semantics, syntax-semantics interface, philosophy of language and Japanese linguistics.