The Generation of Tense

In this chapter I am concerned with the question of how speakers convey temporal meaning in actual speech. More specifically, I will be dealing with speakers’ choice of tense forms contributing appropriately to the linguistic formulation of the intended message. Although tense marking of the verb is obligatory in all Indo-European languages, tense is not the only linguistic means for conveying temporal information in these languages, nor is the meaning of the tenses the only type of temporal information contributing to the temporal reference of an utterance. Therefore, I will first present an overview of different types or categories of temporal meaning and relate these to certain categories of linguistic expressions (Section 1). In Section 2, I will present some observations about the interaction between tense, lexical aspect and temporal adverbs in German. Finally, in Section 3, I will discuss some of the constraints that these interactions impose on a language production system which is functioning at well-defined levels of processing (conceptual, functional, positional) and is characterized by specific processing properties like modularity, incrementality and linearity.