318 The subjectivity of utterance

time (e.g., the death of John's uncle) as properties of the time referred to. But it is not possible to do this, except in very special contexts, by means of tense. Non-incidental reference to time, whether deictic or non-deictic, involves the use of lexical expres­sions and, generally, also of more complex grammatical constructions. Looked at from the viewpoint of logical semantics, direct (non-incidental) reference to time (as also to space) requires that the language in which reference is made should be of a higher order than first-order formal languages such as the simple (unextended) predicate calculus. Many, if not all, natural languages are higher-order languages in this sense. But whether they are or are not has nothing to do with their being tensed or tenseless languages.

Tense may now be defined rather more fully than it was earlier in this section as the category which results from the grammaticalization of incidental (definite) deictic temporal reference. I have put 'definite' in brackets, since the question whether definiteness of reference is necessarily, rather than just typically, associated with tense is debatable. In other respects, however, the definition that I have just given is intended to be uncontroversial - uncontroversial, that is to say, as a definition of pure and primary tense (in the sense of 'pure' and 'primary' established in section 10.2).

The application of the definition in the description of particu­lar languages is far from uncontroversial. As was mentioned at the end of the preceding section, there are those who would argue that the standard view of deixis, and more especially of tense, "derives from philosophically challengeable, empiricist, assumptions about the primacy of the physical world (and of locutionary, rather than cognitive, deixis)". There are alterna­tive, non-standard, theories of tense which do not take temporal­ity as such to be what is grammaticalized by tense. Such theories are to be taken seriously; but, since they are non-standard, they will not be discussed further in this book.

Granted that pure primary tense grammaticalizes temporal­ity, there is still room for argument as to whether what are nor­mally regarded as tenses in particular languages exhibit pure primary tense in all or any of their uses. Even in English, and

10.3 The grammatical category of tense 319

more strikingly in many other languages, there are uses of the past tense and of the future tense that are modal, rather than temporal (for modality see 10.5). Indeed, as far as what is tradi­tionally classified as the future tense in English is concerned, grammarians are nowadays divided on the issue whether it is basically — and purely and primarily - a tense (in terms of the standard definition of tense). Formally, of course, it differs from what is undoubtedly the major two-term tense-distinction in English: past versus non-past. What I am now calling the past versus non-past distinction is traditionally described as a distinc­tion between past tense and present tense. But the term 'non-past' is formally (and perhaps also semantically) more appropri­ate. Whereas the past versus non-past distinction (or past-tense versus present-tense distinction) is marked inflectionally, the so-called future tense is formed periphrastically with 'will' and 'shall'. Morphologically and syntactically 'will' and 'shall' are comparable with the modal auxiliaries 'may', 'must' and 'can'. Arguably, they are also comparable with the modal auxiliaries semantically, in many of their uses, including their use as so-called future auxiliaries.

It is probably fair to say that contemporary linguistically sophisticated and authoritative accounts of the tense-system of Modern English are evenly divided on the question whether the so-called future tense (with 'will' and 'shall') is basically tem­poral or modal. The fact that there is this division of opinion is itself significant: it shows that, as is commonly the case, the ques­tion is not readily answered and may not be answerable in the terms in which it is formulated. But whatever view individual linguists take on this issue, they will all agree that there are many uses of the so-called future, in English and many other languages, that are clearly modal rather than temporal. They may also agree that reference to the future, in contrast with refer­ence to the past or the present, is generally, if not always, tinged either with uncertainty or, alternatively, with expectancy and anticipation. Such attitudes are traditionally regarded as modal and, as we shall see in the following section, are frequently expressed by the grammatical category of mood. All that needs to be said in summary is that the distinction between temporality