Tense Operators Versus Quantifiers Terence Parsons The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 70, No. 18, Seventieth Annual Meeting of the American Philosophical Association Eastern Division. (Oct. 25, 1973), pp. 609-610. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0022-362X%2819731025%2970%3A18%3C609%3ATOVQ%3E2.0.CO%3B2-D The Journal of Philosophy is currently published by Journal of Philosophy, Inc..
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LOGICAL STRUCTURE I N NATURAL LANGUAGES
609
xilay contain an anaphoric pronoun as a subpart. This fact is also illustrated in examples (21c)-(21e) of the preceding section. V. CONCLUSION
My main hypothesis has teen that there is a considerable and striking parallel in the behavior of tenses and pronouns, at least in English. T h e corollary seems to be that if pronouns have to be treated as variables and not as sentence operators (the latter being a view I have never heard advanced or seen any evidence for), the same must be true of tenses, though not of the other elements of the auxiliary, namely modals, perfect, and progressive. T h e evidence given for the main hypothesis has been inforinal and fragmentary, and I have not even begun to offer the explicit syntactic and semantic rules that would be necessary to turn the hypothesis into a substantive claim about the structure of English. I have suggested an approach to the treatment of tenses which seems to lead from the observed parallels, but I can't make any strong claims about it without working out a full analysis, and that remains as a future project. BARBARA HALL PARTEE
University of Massachusetts, Anlherst
TENSE OPERATORS VERSUS QUANTIFIERS
*
P
ROFESSOR PARTEE has shown that the English tenses, Past and Present, behave surprisingly like pronouns, and this suggests encouragement of theories of natural langauge in which tenses get represented by the use of quantifiers and variables that range over times. She has also suggested that these tenses cannot be represented by operators, as is customary in many versions of tense logic. But this is not obvious; for tense operators are in fact capable of manifesting at least some pronoun-like behavior. Take "variable-binding" for example. Operators do something like this by means of scope. T o illustrate with a non-tense example, we can write either:
or: (2) For some possible world w, A is true in w. *Abstract of a paper to be presented in an APA symposium on Logical Structure in Natural Languages, December 28, 1973, commenting on Barbara Partee, "Some Structural Analogies between Tenses and Pronouns in English." thiv JOURNAL, this issue, 601-609.
610
THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
The appearance of 'A' within the scope of the operator '0'in (1) serves the same purpose as the binding of 'w' in ' A is true in w' by the quantifier of (2). Similarly with tenses; compare: (2) I t was the case that A.
with: (4) For some past time t, A is true at t.
T h e main advantage of explicit quantification of times over the use of tense operators is that the former is a more powerful notation -it can be used to express things that cannot be expressed in the tense-operator notation. But if the expressive resources of English tenses do not exploit this extra expressive power, i.e., if the expressive resources of English tenses do not exceed the expressive power of tense operators, then this is an insight about English that is worth noting. I think, in fact, that all the examples in Partee's paper can be adequately symbolized using only tense operators. Whether this is true for all of English requires a careful discussion of other examples, together with consideration of certain words (specifically 'now' and 'then') which interact with tenses. TERENCE PARSONS
University of Massachusetts
TENSES AND PRONOUNS
"
P
ROFESSOR PARTEE suggests some analogies between tenses and pronouns and argues on the basis of these analogies that tenses, like pronouns, should be given a formal semantic representation in terms of variables and quantifiers, as contrasted with a representation in terms of sentence operators. I agree that the analogies are there, and that they are illuminating. But I want to raise some questions about how the analogies should be characterized and about what they show about how tenses should be represented. I n my comments, I will try to do three things: first, to say in general terms what I think the basis is for the analogies between tenses and pronouns; second, to raise some questions about what Partee calls the "deictic" use of pronouns and tenses-a notion that seems *Abstract of a paper to be presented in an APA sympsium on Logical Structure in Natural Languages, December 28, 1973, commenting on Barbara Partee, "Some Structural Analogies between Tenses and Pronouns in English," this JOURNAL, this issue, 601-G09.
