Advances in Role and Reference Grammar

472 MICHAEL SILVERSTEIN

Figure 2

The respective complements of these categories gives pragmatically deduci-

ble "present" and "past"; and the "future" reading is either based on a

modal category or is classified regularly with one of these, depending on the

aspectual properties of the interval of speaking as lexicalized in the verba

dicendi.

The next most simple system includes a special marking for a true tense

opposition, having marked form for "past" tense, i.e., a specific marking

for the case where the narrated event is to be evaluated for a point in an

interval earlier than — i.e., which concludes by — the moment of speaking.

This is a true pragmatic, tense category as distinguished from the pragmatic

implementation of semantic categories of aspect. See Figure 3. In fact, the

construction of the necessary interval as completed by the moment of

speaking depends on the aspectual characteristics of events, though the

actual tense morpheme or equivalent adds to this the encompassment of

both some predicated event and the speech event in an ordered relationship

in some larger interval. When a tense-aspect system crosses this "past/non-

past'marking with its aspectual category, one can have an "imperfect" past

as opposed to a "simple" or "perfect" past, of course. It is important to see,

with Bull, that this notion of the past being ordered within an interval with

respect to the moment of speaking implies that the simplest "past" is a vecto­

rial (minus vector) measure of pastness from the present as the point of ref­

erence. Similarly, a slightly more complicated system has a vectorial future

in addition to a vectorial past, defining a temporal relationship of sequen-