Tense Selection and the Temporal Interpretation of Complement Clauses

Abstract

The problem addressed in this paper is tense selection. Clausal complements of verbs such as expect and predict appear to select for finite verbs that are future marked and for infinitival complements that have a future interpretation. It is argued that these two facts can (and must) be given a uniform account. To that end I adopt a relational treatment of tenses and argue for a particular architecture of composition in which the free application of abstraction is component of the grammar. The lexical semantics of future-selecting verbs is argued to contain an implicit future operator and these verbs are taken to select for future relations. The resulting framework is one in which untensed clauses are fundamentally distinguished from tensed clauses, and type-shifting is a regular part of the interpretive process.