Perspective and the future-in-the-past

Abstract

The paper investigates the future-in-the-past (FiP) as in Peter would (later) see the Fujiyama. FiP can convey an outlook on events that, as the speaker knows, took place later (“objective sense”). FiP can also convey a past utterance or thought of a protagonist. In this perspective-taking sense, FiP sentences share the uncertainty about the future of present tense will-sentences. Kaufmann’s (2005) semantic treatment of the future is extended to account for shifted senses of the future-in-the-past, leading to the insight that tense scopes differently in non-shifted and shifted future-in-the-past. A final outlook speculates about more radical changes in the analysis of tense and aspect in order to account for this observation.