On the Cross-Linguistic Interpretation of Embedded Tenses

Abstract

We propose a semantic analysis of cross-linguistic variation in the distribution and interpretation of tenses embedded in propositional attitude complements and temporal adjunct clauses in English, Japanese and Russian. We compare our analysis to previous ones proposed by Ogihara (1994, 1996) and Arregui and Kusumoto (1998), which attribute the variation to syntactic differences between the languages, and argue that the semantic analysis is preferable on both empirical and conceptual grounds.