SOME STRUCTURAL ANALOGIES BETWEEN TENSES
AND PRONOUNS IN ENGLISH *
THE area of tense logic and its relation to English covers a
wide range of problems, but I want to narrow my attention
here to certain aspects of the uses of the two English tense
morphemes Past and Present,l and compare them with related uses of
the personal pronouns (he, she, it, etc.). I will argue that the tenses
have a range of uses which parallels that of the pronouns, including
a contrast between deictic (demonstrative) and anaphoric use, and
that this range of uses argues in favor of representing the tenses in
terms of variables and not exclusively as sentence operators.
I n restricting my attention to the two tenses Past and Present, I
am following the syntactic analysis of the English auxiliary system
first set out by Noam Chomsky
(1) Aux +JTns (Modal) (have +en) (be +ing)
Present} n Past
I n this system, the affixes Present, Past, en, and ing are subsequently
attached by a transformation to the verb stems immediately following
them. For example, the underlying form Past have en eat is
transformed into had eaten; Past can be ing go becomes could be
going. The so-called "future tense" is analyzed as Present plus the
+ T o be presented in an APA symposium on Logical Structure in Natural
Languages, December 28, 1973; commentators will be Terence Parsons and Robert
C. Stalnaker; see this JOURNAL, this issue, 609-610 and 610-612, respectively.
1 I will use 'Past' and 'Present' to refer to the English tense morphemes, and
'past' and 'present' to refer to times.
2 Syntactic Structures (The Hague: Mouton, 1957).