1887
Volume 40, Issue 1
  • ISSN 0929-7332
  • E-ISSN: 1569-9919

Abstract

Abstract

The simple past in Dutch, as in many other European languages, is not necessarily used to refer to a past eventuality. A Dutch example of a verb in simple past that does not refer to a past event, taken from the Spoken Dutch Corpus (CGN), is: ‘Dad is going to play golf tomorrow.’ Here, the past tense verb ‘went’ can be called a ‘fake past’, since it refers to a future eventuality, as can be seen from the adverb . We argue that this use of the past tense is not modal, because it does not involve reference to a counterfactual, hypothetical, or unlikely eventuality. We present a Reichenbachian (1947) analysis of this use of past tense, in which we argue that while the eventuality takes place in the future, past tense is used to indicate that the point of perspective (R) is situated in the past (i.e. R-S-E).

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2023-11-03
2025-06-15
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  • Article Type: Research Article
Keyword(s): fake past; future; point of perspective; Reichenbachian analysis; spoken Dutch
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