시제 해석 규칙

Temporal Interpretation Rules

The purpose of this paper is to expand Stowell (1993), Stowell (1995), Stowell (1996)'s syntactic analysis of tense in English. Stowell treats Tense as a dyadic predicate of temporal ordering which takes those two time-denoting phrases as its arguments. He further argues that those two morphemes 'resent' and 'past' are polarity-sensitive elements encoding an LF-scope relation with respect to true PAST tense. This paper proposes that English future 'will' should be treated as a true tense and that its future morpheme is an anti-PAST polarity item. It also provides a syntactic interpretation of a peculiar morphological aspect of English that it has no future form of the verb. To this end, Stowell's analysis is incorporated into the Minimalist program of Chomsky(1995). It is proposed that, unlike in other languages like French and Spanish, FUTURE in English is of an affix. This provides an intuitively correct description of why English verbs do not have a future form like other languages. The last but not least point which this paper will discuss is that Ogihara (1995a)'s claim that the referential theory of tensed sentences is inadequate is untenable.