My impression is that what makes the examples from Comrie acceptible with a deictic reading is the use of a temporal adverb to place the event in the future. The use of "will" alone will not do it. I think he might have gone almost that far in what he said. The "will" is not really a tense in the sense that many languages have tense, and needs help from the adverb. It is really modal, and its temporal use is secondary. Its form is present, while the form "would" is past. The semantic category of time over against the syntactic category of tense in the modals is often confused by second language learners. The native English speaker is often taught something contrary in the schools and come to think of these terms as interchangeable, so there may be much confusion on the issue.

The examples that Tero mentioned which do not stem from Comrie (notably those from Hornstein), are, then, likely to appear in need of being completed by an adverb. (And indeed some people to whom he had spoken deemed at least some of Hornstein's sentences as unacceptable.)

He conjectures: "It would be nice to know if in some languages that do have a real future tense (say, French) it might be possible to have an unproblematic case of a deictically interpreted embedded tense. However, my feeling for non-native languages besides English is not strong enough to enable me even to credibly speculate with the possibility. (And my native language, Finnish, does not have even a modal surrogate of future tense.)"

I think some of the ATEGers have already mentioned some of their experiences in this arena. I wish we could all exhibit Tero's humility. I believe that the aspect of "past perfect" read as a tense falls into the same category.

I sent this to an interested party ...

Without an indication of timing, either stated or compelled by context, there can be no past perfect.

... and he wrote back, "This is indeed one of the subtlest rules of grammar I’ve ever encountered (and the first time I’ve every heard about it)."

ATEGians, what do you make of the exchange? Did I not point him in the right direction?

.brad.15apr08

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