The Literary Mind.pdf

152 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 standard
beginning frame for analyses in the tradition of Hans Reichenbach's influential
Elements of Symbolic Logic.
This beginning frame is often stated rather technically, as in John 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 speaking
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 anticipation
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 itself indicates
that the narrative mental space containing the focal event precedes the viewpoint.
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 speaking,
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