Past Tense

The present tense, for example, may be used to express not only a habitual event or a state happening in the present time (e.g. Mary drives to work) but also something happening in the future, as in Bill leaves for China on Tuesday, and the past, as when a speaker says I was in the pub last night and this bloke comes up to me to ask if I knew him. Past Tense, on the other hand, may be used to signal not only past time but also some pre-speech time situation(s) expressing counterfactuality as in I wondered if I could see you briefly this afternoon, If you had caught an early train, you would not have missed your flight or Don’t you think it’s time you went to school? These, however, can be viewed as extensions to the core meaning of the Past Tense, which is to signal past time. An adequate characterization of the concept of time requires us to be aware of the occurrence of an event in relation to a deictic point (i.e., whether it is contemporaneous, anterior or posterior to speech time) and also to a reference point. The contribution that a reference point makes in the understanding of tense and time can be appreciated when we consider a sentence with a verb in the past perfect such as When the phone rang, Mary had left the house or By noon, Mary had left the house. These sentences describe the event of leaving the house as having taken place in the past not only in relation to the moment of speech (i.e., prior to the moment of speech) but also in relation to the reference point (i.e., prior to the reference point): when the phone rang in the first example and by noon in the second example

Chapter One Tense and Aspect The basic structural form of the English verb group is quite well known and poses few problems; furthermore, the details have been analysed many times in the literature (from virtually every theoretical perspective). We can analyse it as follows, omitting the specification of which suffixes are appropriate on the various elements: This formula begs certain questions: how are the suffixes specified? does the order of elements in the verb group need to be specified arbitrarily, or does it follow from more general principles? what is the categorial status of all of these elements? These are questions that have been beaten to death in the transformational literature, their major characteristic being that they bear on the types of grammatical device available in linguistic theory. I shall not be concerned with these questions, but rather with the meaning of these various options, and the problem of their compatibility with different verbs. There is a useful distinction to be made between 'tense' and 'aspect', both of which are found in English. Tense is a category which primarily involves the time of the event or state specified by the verb relative to the moment of utterance; aspect, on the other hand, is notoriously difficult to define: it is perhaps best to see it as focusing round such concepts as completion, repetition, habituality, etc. Look first at the category of tense in English: any of the positions marked 'suffix' in (1) are in principle available to be filled with a tense marker (which on the most regular of verbs corresponds to –0,– s or – ed). It is sometimes assumed that English has three tenses – past, present and future – but in fact there are only two relevant formal distinctions in English (–0 and – s are of course a single option, the difference between them not being a matter of tense, but rather the person and number of their subject noun phrase)

Chapter 3 The Expression of Past Time 53