312 The subjectivity of utterance

something should he said about the grammatical category of tense, which, as I mentioned earlier in this section, is found in many, but not all, natural languages. Tense will be dealt with in the following section.

10.3 THE GRAMMATICAL CATEGORY OF TENSE

The term 'tense' is one of the terms of traditional grammar that is widely used in its traditional sense by those who would claim no special expertise in linguistics. It is of course derived ultimately (via Old French) from the Latin word 'tempus', meaning "time".

One of the points made in the preceding section was that there are many natural languages which do not have tense. Many stu­dents, initially, find this difficult to accept. It is important to emphasize, therefore, that the fact that a language does not have tense does not mean that speakers of such languages (e.g., Chinese or Malay) cannot distinguish linguistically between present and past events or between present and future events. What it means is that such distinctions of deictic temporal refer­ence are lexicalized, rather than grammaticalized. It is as if in English there were a grammatically correct tenseless sentence such as

(10) 'It be raining (now/yesterday/tomorrow)', which could be used in place of

(l0a)'It is raining (now)'

(l0b) 'It was raining (yesterday)'

(l0c) 'It will be raining (tomorrow)',

to refer to the present, the past and the future as the case may be. In English, temporal deictic reference is both grammaticalized (as tense) and lexicalized (in a wide range of adverbs). Very often, however, the tense is redundant in that the context makes it clear whether the event being referred to took place in the past, is taking place in the present or will take place in the future. There is nothing odd, therefore, about a language without tense. Tenseless languages are not intrinsically less expressive or

10.3 The grammatical category of tense 313

semantically poorer (provided that they have a sufficiently wide range of lexical expressions) than tensed languages. I should add, in passing, that it is of course possible to define the term 'tense' in such a way that it covers lexical expressions. But the traditional distinction between grammaticalization and lexicalization is not to be jettisoned lightly. The fact that the distinction is not sharp, so that, for example, the modal and auxiliary verbs of English or various classes of particles in English and other languages can be regarded as semi-grammatical (or semi-lexical), rather than as being fully grammatical or fully lexical, is irrelevant. In the standard usage of linguists (if not of philosophers and logicians), tense is by definition a matter of grammaticalization.

It is now generally accepted that tense involves, not just tem­poral reference as such, but deictic temporal reference: i.e., that it involves reference to a point or interval of time which is determined in relation to the moment of utterance. When it is being used with what is generally regarded as its basic meaning, the present tense (in any language that has a present tense) refers either to the moment of utterance itself (the temporal zero-point - the now of the here-and-now — of the deictic context) or, more commonly, to an interval, or period, which contains the moment of utterance. Traditional definitions of 'tense', upon which all standard dictionary definitions are based, are misleading or defective in that they do not make explicit the essentially deictic character of tense. Dictionary definitions of tense are usually defective in other respects also.

First of all, they tend to be typologically restricted in that they make tense a morphological (or, more especially, an inflec­tional) category of the verb. Now, it is empirically the case that in most morphologically synthetic, or inflecting, languages that do have tense the difference between one tense and another is marked by inflectional variation in the forms of the verb. This is the case, for example, in English: cf. is/was, sing(s)/sang. But not all languages are morphologically synthetic; and, even if a language is morphologically synthetic and furthermore has verbal inflection, there is no reason in principle why distinc­tions of tense must necessarily be expressed in inflectionally