Past tense reference to future eventualities

Abstract

Abstract The simple past in Dutch, as in many other European languages, is not necessarily used to refer to a past eventuality. A Dutch example of a verb in simple past that does not refer to a past event, taken from the Spoken Dutch Corpus (CGN), is: Pa die ging morgen golfen ‘Dad is going to play golf tomorrow.’ Here, the past tense verb ging ‘went’ can be called a ‘fake past’, since it refers to a future eventuality, as can be seen from the adverb tomorrow. We argue that this use of the past tense is not modal, because it does not involve reference to a counterfactual, hypothetical, or unlikely eventuality. We present a Reichenbachian (1947) analysis of this use of past tense, in which we argue that while the eventuality takes place in the future, past tense is used to indicate that the point of perspective (R) is situated in the past (i.e. R-S-E).