by Mark Turner
LANGUAGE Q. 149
nia, and although the technical literature on tense as a facet of many different languages is voluminous, scholars of tense agree that tense is not well under- stood as a grammatical phenomenon. Robert Binnick begins his encyclopedic 1991 work, Time ana'tlJe Verb, “It is no contradiction to say that we know a very great deal about tense, but understand it little. . . . It has been difficult even to know how much we do understand it, for confusing as discussions of the tenses of various languages may be, the scholarly literature concerning tense in general is, if anything, even more confusing.” It seems reasonably clear that any general explanation of tense finally accepted will look substantially different from what we have now.
We explored in chapter 7 the basic human story of a person recognizing a story. In this general story, there is a recognizing agent who has a single spatial focus and a single spatial viewpoint. We saw that projecting the story of percep- tion in space with spatial focus and spatial viewpoint onto the story of percep- tion in time gives us an agent with a temporal focus and temporal viewpoint. Someone recognizing a story in time has, by means of this projection, a particu- lar temporal focus and a particular temporal viewpoint.
In spatial perception, there are alternative foci and viewpoints. In temporal perception, there are alternative temporal foci and temporal viewpoints. This structure of temporal foci and viewpoints is projected to create a rudimentary grammatical system of tense. The projection of certain relations between tem- poral focus and temporal viewpoint creates certain constructions of tense. In English, basically, the grammatical construction of present tense corresponds to the narrative category in which temporal focus and viewpoint are the same; the grammatical construction of past tense corresponds to the narrative category in which the focus precedes the viewpoint; the grammatical construction of future tense (or technically, of verb phrase constructions that we commonly say signify “future tense”) corresponds to the narrative category in which the viewpoint pre- r:edes the focus. A relative tense such as we find in “I will have run” corresponds to a complex narrative structure in which viewpoint precedes focus, but the focus itself contains a viewpoint that is preceded by its own different focus. Techni- cally, spaces A and C precede space B; C has the event of running; A has a speaker considering B; B has an agent identical to the speaker and the runner and who is considering space C. So A is a viewpoint on B as a focus and B is a viewpoint on C as a focus. Tense lets us express such a structure of temporal viewpoints and foci as “I will have run.”
Often we are told—or have reason to suspect, or assume from background knowledge—that the temporal viewpoint is identified with the actual moment of speaking, but this is an independent circumstance. Although it is the default circumstance, it is not fixed and does not have to be used. In story, the identifi-
150 .9 THE LITERARY MIND
cation is optional; it is therefore optional in tense. Linguists often regard an utterance in English that makes no use of this identification as a problem, an exception that requires special explanation. I offer a different view. In the parabolic view of tense, present tense arises as the counterpart of the narrative structure in which temporal focus and temporal viewpoint belong to the same space. Only in the default case does viewpoint also correspond to the moment of speaking. Cases that do not fit the default scenario are not problems or exceptions. Let us consider some examples.
I will begin with examples that make the nonidentification of viewpoint and moment of speaking very obvious——they sound odd out of context, but people said them.
In the first example, the setting is a veranda; an old man is sitting; his old wife co mes out, and, after a pause, sits down beside him; the silence grows more nervous; at last, the old man says, “It was a warm night on the banks of the intercoastal waterway. He sat alone, until she finally appeared and sat beside him. She seemed distracted and unhappy. At last, she announced—“ Here, the man telling the story gestures to his wife to announce whatever it is she has to announce; the man and woman in the story are the old man and old woman on the veranda. In this example, the past tense tells us that the focus lies behind the viewpoint. From context, we know that the focus is the moment of speaking. The viewpoint is not the moment of speaking. Instead, the moment of speaking precedes the viewpoint.
Consider another lively real example with similar structure. A wife and husband are traveling in Greece; at night, they defend against mosquitos by cov- ering the hotel window with netting; kounoupi is Greek for “mosquito.”
I am going to clean up, take a shower, lay down my naked body. What about the kounoupi netting? My husband took care of that while I was in the shower.
The past tense tells us the focus precedes the viewpoint: The focus is the space in which the husband puts up the kounoupi netting; the viewpoint is sometime after the focus; but we know from context that the moment of speaking precedes the viewpoint (as well as the focus).
Now consider idiomatic examples that have similar structure. Two travelers ask the train attendant to tell them the destinations of each of five trains that are sitting at platforms; the conductor tells them; the travelers think it over, and one of them asks, “That train, where did it go?” In this case, the focus precedes the viewpoint but we know from context that the moment of speaking precedes both of them. Later, one of the travelers can start to hop on the wrong train arid the other can say, “Wait! That train went to Nice!” Consider also:
LANGUAGE Q. 151
Which of these things do you want to give to charity? That one goes, that one goes, that one goes, that one stays. When?
The moment the charity truck shows up, they go.
Here, viewpoint and focus are the same and we know from context that the moment of speaking precedes both. Consider the setting in which Jane comes home and gripes at Mary that the dishes are not done. Mary says, “Today, I will get up early to run a million stupid errands, clean the bathroom, shop for food, entertain Jane’s charming mother for lunch, and prepare dinner. Jane will come home and then Jane will gripe about the dishes. I will sljoot her between the eyes, and the grandjury will decline to indict.” Here, viewpoint precedes focus but we know from context that the moment of speaking is bracketed by the focus.
There are many other recognized cases in which viewpoint does not corre- spond to moment of speaking. In “historic present,” focus is viewpoint but we know that both precede moment of speaking: “It’s the late fifteenth century: Columbus has just anchored and is being rowed to the shore. He sees palm trees and a sandy beach.” “It’s the dawn of humankind: a smaller than average pri- mate picks up a leg bone and smashes the head of his antagonist.”
In “futuric present,” focus is viewpoint but we know that moment of speak- ing precedes both:
So, what do you say tomorrow when you ask for a raise? I go in, she asks me about the financing, I tell her it’s finished, she beams and com-
pliments me, and I say . . .
There are also cases in which viewpoint precedes focus and focus precedes (often by centuries) moment of speaking: “The Theran explosion will wipe out the Minoans, the Achaeans will burn Troy, Alexander will make the city-state obsolete, and Rome will erase almost everybody. But the archaeological record of everyday implements will survive for us to unearth and explain.”
There are many such examples. They are not exceptions, but instances of the general case in which narrative imagining includes relations of temporal focus and viewpoint that are projected to create rudimentary grammatical construc- tions of tense. In the default instance, viewpoint may correspond additionally to moment of speaking. The existence of the default is understandable: Although we may shift temporal viewpoint in imagination, viewpoint and moment of speak- ing occur simultaneously in our perceptual present. But this additional default association is not the general case, and other associations are not exceptions.
This is not the standard way of analyzing absolute tenses. Typically, expla- na
tions of tense begin from the view that tense expresses the temporal relationship
152 .6 THE LITERARY MIND
between the event reported and the moment of speech: past tense for events before the moment of speech, present tense for events overlapping the moment of speech, future tense for events after the moment of speech. This is the beginning frame used by Bernard Comrie in Tense: “past time reference is the basic meaning of the past tense”; “As far as the present tense is concerned, in its basic meaning it invariably locates a situation at the present moment.” It is equivalently the stan- dard beginning frame for analyses in the tradition of Hans Reichenbach’s influ- ential Elements of Symbolic Logic.
This beginning frame is often stated rather technically, as inJohn Dinsmore’s formulation in “The Logic and Functions of the English Past and Perfect,” in which he proposes that the following rule expresses the meaning of English Past:
(Past) For any time T and sentence S, at(T, pa(S)) iff at(T, S) and
T < now.
Buried in this formalism is the claim that the past of a sentence is true of a certain time if and only if the sentence is true of that time and that time precedes the moment of speaking. This does not fit “My husband took care of that while I was in the shower”: yes, the present-tense version of the sentence is true of the narrative mental space of taking the shower; yes, the past—tense version is true of that mental space as viewed from the viewpoint; yes, the time of that mental space precedes the time of the viewpoint; but no, the the time of that mental space does not precede the moment of speaking. On the contrary, moment of speak- ing precedes focus and focus precedes viewpoint.
Everyone recognizes that there are such exceptions. The typical way to handle these exceptions is ad hoc, one at a time, through local contrivance. In As Time Goes By, Norbert Hornstein observes that the principal exception occurs when a text “establishes a date that then acts as the anchor for the interpretation of the tenses used,” as in “It was 1812, just before the Battle of Borodino. The antici— pation of the coming struggle is palpable.”
But “My husband took care of that while I was in the shower”_ does not explicitly establish a time that acts as the viewpoint. Rather, the tense z'tse[f indi- cates that the narrative mental space containing the focal event precedes the view— point. The relationship of this viewpoint to the moment of speaking is not part of the grammar but is rather something that we establish pragmatically. Our default pragmatic assumption may be that the viewpoint is the moment of speak- ing, but, importantly, that default assumption does not have to be used, as all such examples show.
The view of tense as arising from the projection of temporal viewpoint and focus requires no extra machinery beyond parable. It also saves us from ad hoc
LANGUAGE Q. 153
explanations. For example, how are we to explain a phrase like “John goes to work at eight o’clock every day”? Bernard Comrie, in an effort to accommodate such examples while still requiring the present tense to situate the event in the present moment, writes, “A certain property (namely, going to work at eight o’clock every day) is assigned to John, and this property is of course true of John even if at the moment he happens not to be on his way to work. In other words, the habit does hold at the present moment, and that is why the present tense is in principle an appropriate tense to use in describing this habitual situation.” Aside from the fact that it is hard to see how going to work in the morning is a habit that holds at other times than morning, or that holds when one is in fact not going to work at all—as during vacations, hospital stays, and so on—this explanation will not handle a case such as the train attendant’s saying “That train goes to Paris” of a train that will. leave for Paris tomorrow morning from a station from which no train has previously departed for Paris and no train ever will again; nor will this explanation work for “Curtis rents the boat” said as part of the presentation of a plan for a nonhabitual future.
Comrie has the similar difficulty for the past tense—as when the waiter asks the Russian equivalent of “Who received the goulash soup?” or says in English, “VVho had the roast beef sandwich?” In these cases, the tense is past but the focal event of receiving or having lies in the future of the moment of speaking. There are harder cases still. In several languages, like Russian, Comrie notes, the past can be used for imminent future events, as in “I left” when one is about to leave. English and French have a similar use for the present, as in “I am coming” or “J’y suis.” Comrie’s expedient, a common one, is to regard such “nonliteral” uses of tense as constituting exceptions that lie outside the scope of his analysis: “Rather, it seems that such uses of the past should simply be treated as exceptions.”
Another “exception” is an extremely common use of the present perfect. Theories of tense often regard the present perfect as marking that the time of the event precedes the moment of speaking. But it can be used for events that one expects to happen, as in “John has won the race,” said when John has not yet crossed the finish line, or “Clinton’s won,” said of the candidate before the elec— tion. A common explanation for this “exception” claims that when the precon- ditions of an events taking place have been fulfilled, then it can be marked as preceding the moment of speaking even though the event is in the future of the moment of speaking.
On the theory that tense arises as a grammatical structure by projection of viewpoint and focus, none of these cases has an exceptional mechanism, they simply do not choose to connect viewpoint with the moment of speaking. “John goes to work every morning” cues us to take a viewpoint on a story of John going to work. The time of the narrative mental space is morning, and the viewpoint
154 .9 THE LITERARY MIND
taken is also morning, and we know pragmatically the relation between the moment of speaking and “morning.” The train attendant takes a temporal view- point on a story of the train's going to Paris that is the same as his temporal focus, and we know pragmatically the relation of thatviewpoint to the moment of speak— ing. The viewpoint on the story of the customers’ receiving their food lies ahead of that space; the viewpoint on the story in which the person who says “I am coming” is coming is the same as the focus; the viewpoint on the story in which John wins the race lies ahead of that narrative mental space. In all these cases, we know the relation between the temporal viewpoint and the moment of speak- ing pragmatically; the default pragmatic identification of temporal viewpoint and moment of speaking is simply not used.
The reasons for taking such viewpoints are not always hard to compute. For example, in the case of “John has won the race,” said whenJohn has not yet crossed the finish line, I would say that putting the event in the past of the viewpoint may serve to indicate a confidence in the event because presumably the past is fixed. Alternative analyses according to which such cases are special exceptions requiring special rules often adduce exactly these reasons. An analysis of “john has won the race” as an exception might say that the special rule is this: The “perfect” marking of the event as anterior to the moment of speaking but rel- evant to the moment of speaking can be used when preconditions of the event are fulfilled at the moment of speaking. These two different explanations share most of their substance. But there is a large difference in the way they frame the analysis of tense. In a view of tense as a grammatical system that arose by proj ec- tion from narrative structure, the “nonliteral” cases are not essentially exceptions to the system of grammatical constructions for tense, and, more importantly, tense can have arisen through machinery whose existence we must already concede: parable.
Even a tough case like “Cows eat grass” does not look unusual on the para— bolic explanation: There is a story of typicality in which everything is doing or being what it typically does or is; the time of that story is eternal; the viewpoint on that space is neither before nor after it; and we know pragmatically the rela- tion of that story to our mental space of our own present reality or to the speake
r’s mental space of the speaker’s reality.
The world does not occur automatically as narrative; even less does it occur automatically as a unique narrative. But it often seems to us as if it does. It may seem as if seeing reality as having a time line with a fixed viewpoint called “the present” requires no narrative imagining. But we are free to choose any other temporal viewpoint. Tense, which arises as a grammatical system by projection from the system of temporal viewpoint and focus, is an instrument for indicat- ing our choice.
LANGUAGE Q. 155
(21
The projection of narrative structure gives rise to rudimentary language, and once rudimentary language is set up, it is extensible beyond the projections that gave it rise. Narrative structure--and, more generally, conceptual structure--is incompa- rably more complicated than grammatical structure. Once grammatical structure is established by projection of narrative structure, it can be adapted to express vast ranges of conceptual structure beyond the structure that gave it rise. One way to adapt a grammatical construction is through metonymy: replacing an element with something conceptually associated with that element. For example, once “verb phrase” is set up as a grammatical construction by projection from the category of events and actions in stories, the verb phrase can be extended to accommodate not only events but also elements related to events. We say, “Mary hit the window,” but also “Mary broke the window," because the window’ s breaking is metonymically associated (as causal result) with the action Mary performed to break it, and “Nlary stoned the window,” because the stone is metonyrnically associated (as instrument) with that action. Different constructions permit different metonyrnies.