46 Chapter 3 Verbs, tense, aspect, and mood
(d) Past time: the historic present
In certain types of narrative, especially in informal style, the present tense is used
instead of the preterite for past time events, even in discourses that have begun in the
preterite:[34] I was waiting at the bus-stop when this guy drives up and otters me a lift in
his BMW, so I ill)'. 'Well, I don 't know,' and he says 'You can trust me, I'm a
grammarian,' so I gg1 in, and off we gQ.5.2 The preterite
(a) Past time
The central use of the preterite is to locate the situation, or the part of it under con
sideration, in past time. Compare the present tense examples in [31] with their
preterite counterparts:
[35] i I promised to be back fo r lunch.
ii Sue mowed the lawn.[perfective]
[imperfective or perfective]Here [i] again has a perfective interpretation: it reports a pr omise made in the past.
Example [ii], however, can be interpreted either imperfectively or perfectively. In
the former case it is the past time analogue of [3lii], with Sue habitually or regularly
mowing the lawn. This state of affairs held at the time that's being referred to.
We noted above that perfective interpretations of present tense clauses with pres
ent time reference are restricted to situations of very short duration, since they have
to be co-extensive with the act of utterance. No comparable constraint applies with
the preterite, however, and thus [35ii], unlike [31ii], can readily be used perfectively
to denote a single act of mowing the lawn located as a whole in past time.
(b) Modal remoteness: the modal preterite
There is a second important use of the preterite where the meaning has to do not
with time but with modality. We call this the modal preterite use. Modality is a
type of meaning that is characteristically associated with mood rather than tense and
is explained further in §8. At this point it's enough to say that it covers various kinds
of case where the situation described in a clause is not presented as factual. The
modal preterite is used to present the situation as, in varying degrees, modally
remote. What this means can best be understood by comparing the modal preterite
with the present tense in such examples as those in [36], where in each pair the time
is the same in [b] as in [a].
[36] PRESENT TENSE
a. I'm glad they live nearby.
11 a. I hope she arrives tomorrow.
11l a. If he loves her, he 'll change his job.
iv a. If you leave now, you 'll miss the
rush-hour traffic.MODAL PRETERITE
b. I wish they lived nearby.
b. I'd rather she arrived tomorrow.
b. Ifhe loved her, he 'd change his job.
b. If you !&.f1. now, you 'd miss the
rush-hour traffic.