Tense in Temporal Adjunct Clauses

Abstract

The behaviour of tense in subordinate clauses is not uniform across languages and theories that deal with the interpretation of tense try to explain this. The interpretation of past and present tense in complement clauses is one of the well known puzzles. Languages differ on this respect, and have been classified accordingly as sequence of tense languages (e.g. English) and non-sequence of tense languages (e.g. Japanese). In this paper we will be concerned mainly with the interpretation of tenses in temporal adjunct clauses (TACs). We will discuss the analysis proposed by Ogihara [1994, 1996] and argue that the differences in tense distribution that we observe between English and Japanese TACs are not to be explained as a case of sequence of tense.