Journal of Pragmatics 14 ( 1990) 57-75 North-Holland 57 zyxwvutsrqpon ING AN AT OF TENSE Susan EHRLICH * Received September 1988; revised version January 1989 This paper investigates the way in which discourse context is relevant to the interpretation of tense in English narrative discourse. I demonstrate that the specific readings available to the simple past tense can be explained, in part, by considering units larger than the sentence along with the grammatical signals which serve to sustain and delimit these units. More specifically, the cohesive device of referential linking between sentences is shown to play an important role in the interpretation of tense. _ _ Model-theoretic approaches to tense and aspect have traditionally articulated a sentence’s truth-conditions in the absence of a discourse context. In recent proposals by Kamp (1979), Kamp and Rohrer (1983) and inrichs ( 1986), however, features of a sentence’s context have been incorporated into its model-theoretic interpretation. A primary motivation for this innovation is the observation that a sequence of past-tense sentences is often understood as tlpnresenting C tierits -wl-i k ck * irccur in succession, their order in the represented world being isomorphic with their order in the text. While a traditional model-theoretic treatment would require that the sentences’ reference times precede speech time in order to satisfy truth conditions, such a treatment would not capture the fact that each sentence’s reference time follows that of the previous sentence. In order to account formally for these ordering relations, Kamp proposes that the reference time of a past tense sentence such as John zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA walked ins&, the room gets transferred to the next event introduced into the discourse kg-2 sentence whose verb is also in the simple past tense (We sat down on the couch). y contrast, a sentence containing the English past progressive does not introduce a new reference time but rather includes the * This is a revised and expanded version of a paper presented at the 1987 Linguistic Society of America’s Annual Meeting, San Francisco. I am grateful to Peter Avery, Jack Chambers, Debbie James, Paul Hopper and Ivan Kalmar for their comments on earlier versions of this paper. Author’s address: S. Ehrlich, Department of Languages, Literatures and Linguistics, York University, 4700 Keele Street, North York, Ontario M3J lP3, Canada. 0378-2166/90/$3.50 0 1990, Elsevier Science Publishers B.V. (North-Holland)