Article published In: Linguistics in the Netherlands 2023
Edited by Sterre Leufkens and Marco Bril
[Linguistics in the Netherlands 40] 2023
► pp. 55–68
Past tense reference to future eventualities
A Reichenbachian approach
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.
For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.
Open Access publication of this article was funded through a Transformative Agreement with Radboud University Nijmegen.
Published online: 3 November 2023
https://doi.org/10.1075/avt.00079.haa
https://doi.org/10.1075/avt.00079.haa
Abstract
The simple past in Dutch, as in many other European languages, is not necessarily used to refer to a past eventuality. A Dutch example of a verb in simple past that does not refer to a past event, taken from the Spoken Dutch Corpus (CGN), is: Pa die ging morgen golfen ‘Dad is going to play golf tomorrow.’ Here, the past tense verb ging ‘went’ can be called a ‘fake past’, since it refers to a future eventuality, as can be seen from the adverb tomorrow. We argue that this use of the past tense is not modal, because it does not involve reference to a counterfactual, hypothetical, or unlikely eventuality. We present a Reichenbach, Hans. 1947. Elements of symbolic logic. New York: Macmillan. analysis of this use of past tense, in which we argue that while the eventuality takes place in the future, past tense is used to indicate that the point of perspective (R) is situated in the past (i.e. R-S-E).
Keywords: spoken Dutch, fake past, point of perspective, Reichenbachian analysis, future
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Narrative past tense
- 3.Past point of perspective
- 4.Occurrences of past tense reference to future eventualities in spoken Dutch
- 5.Conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- Note
References
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Haans, Harvey
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