@article{Stranahan_2019, title={Vacuous and Non-Vacuous Behaviors of the Present Tense in English}, volume={18}, url={https://ojs.ub.uni-konstanz.de/sub/index.php/sub/article/view/325}, abstractNote={<p>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.</p>}, journal={Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung}, author={Stranahan, Laine}, year={2019}, month={May}, pages={415–432} }