On double access, cessation and parentheticality

Abstract

Arguably the biggest challenge in analyzing English tense is to account for the double access interpretation, which arises when a present tensed verb is embedded under a past attitude – e.g. John said that Mary is pregnant. Present-under-past does not always result in a felicitous utterance, however – cf. #John believed that Mary is pregnant. While such oddity has been noted, the contrast has never been explained. In fact, English grammars and manuals generally prohibit present-under-past. Work on double access, on the other hand, has either disregarded the oddity (e.g. Abusch 1997: 39) or treated it as a reflex of a particular dialect (e.g. Kratzer 1998: 14). The goal of the paper is to argue – based on a corpus study – that a present-under-past sentence is grammatical, but modulated by two, interacting pragmatic phenomena: cessation and parentheticality