Tham khảo tài liệu 'the grammar of the english verb phrase part 20', ngoại ngữ, ngữ pháp tiếng anh phục vụ nhu cầu học tập, nghiên cứu và làm việc hiệu quả | 126 2. Towards a theory of tense and time tions inferred from contextual information or pragmatic knowledge between the times of full situations and orientation times. W-simultaneity occurs when at least one point of one full situation coincides in time with any point of another full situation strict coincidence of the times of the entire situation is not necessary. A situation may be interpreted as simultaneous anterior or posterior to another situation without this being expressed by a tense form or temporal adverbial. In that case the temporal relations are not tense relations T-rela-tions or adverbially indicated relations Adv-relations but simply temporal relations that are inferred to exist in the real world or in whatever world is being referred to on the basis of the context or of the hearer s pragmatic knowledge of the world in question. We will refer to such temporal relations as WORLD RELATIONS W-RELATIONS . What were they doing Betty was reading the paper Bill was watching TV and Jeremy was sleeping on the sofa. The three past tense forms are absolute tense forms which do no more than locate the three situation times in the past. In other words none of them expresses T-simultaneity. However it is clear from the context that the three situation times must be interpreted as W-simultaneous with each other. When they had first visited the house they hadn t noticed the wet patch on the ceiling of the kitchen. The past perfect tense forms both represent their situation time as T-anterior to an unspecified past orientation time. The relation of W-simulta-neity that is understood to exist between the two situations is not expressed by the tense forms. John told me he was involved in an accident in France. The two absolute past tense forms merely locate their situation times in the past see . Pragmatic knowledge tells us that John s accident must be understood as W-anterior to his telling me about it. Unlike simultaneity expressed by a tense
