Tense and Aspect

Abstract

The theory we have developed in the preceding chapters ignores all questions of reference to time. In view of this one might have thought that it cannot possibly by right. For in natural languages such as English reference to time is ubiquitous. Virtually every English sentence involves an element of temporal reference because of the tense of its verb: as a first approximation, a sentence in the past tense locates the episode it describes before the utterance time, sentences in the future tense serve to describe episodes later than the time of utterance and a present tense sentence is typically used to present a condition as holding over some period which surrounds the utterance time. Since our theory paid no heed to any of this, how could it possibly be correct?