Tense and evidence
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 17560226 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Susanna Cummings (0000-0001-5629-3269, UCLA Health, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Volume | 49 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 153-175 |
| Publication date | 2026-02-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Linguistics and Philosophy (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0165-0157 • E-ISSN: 1573-0549 |
| Publisher | Springer Science+Business Media (PUBLISHER • DE) |
| DOI | 10.1007/s10988-025-09452-w |
| OpenAlex | W7127113677 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 19 |
This paper argues that tense is used to mark evidential source in English. Specifically, nonfuture tenses mark the speaker’s evidence as causally downstream from the event being described. This amounts to a linguistic solution to a puzzle recently posed by Dilip Ninan (“Assertion, evidence and the future,” The Philosophical Review, 2022). The analysis is principally supported by parallel phenomena in evidential systems of Bulgarian and Korean
Bulgarian · Future tense · Past tense · Philosophy of language · Present tense · Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics · Philosophy and Theoretical Science · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation
Sequence of Tense and Temporal de re
I.--the Thought
Totally Between Subjectivity and Discourse. Exploring the Pragmatic Side of Intensification.
A Judge-Free Semantics for Predicates of Personal Taste
Acquaintance and evidence in appearance language
Assertion, Evidence, and the Future
Judging for ourselves
As Time Goes By
The Acquisition of Syntactically Encoded Evidentiality
Would have become
Evidentiality
Temporal constraints on the meaning of evidentiality
Timing of evidence and epistemic modal claims
Future reference with and without future marking
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |