TY - JOUR AU - Stranahan, Laine PY - 2019/05/10 Y2 - 2024/03/29 TI - Vacuous and Non-Vacuous Behaviors of the Present Tense in English JF - Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung JA - SuB VL - 18 IS - 0 SE - Articles DO - UR - https://ojs.ub.uni-konstanz.de/sub/index.php/sub/article/view/325 SP - 415-432 AB - <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> ER -