Vacuous and Non-Vacuous Behaviors of the Present Tense in English

Abstract

The present tense behaves vacuously when modifying nominals expressing intervals like “last Tuesday” but not when modifying nominals expressing individuals like “John.” Under a presuppositional theory of tense, I show that if the present tense is vacuous then the difference in behavior can be reduced to a difference in the relative scopes of presupposition maximization and distributivity, and that in turn the scope difference can be explained by a general principle of utterance strength maximization.