Tenses and Contextual Factors in a Discourse

This paper investigates temporal phenomena such as temporal domain formation and simultaneity of times involved in when-clauses in a larger chunk of sentences. Tenses are interpreted in a limited domain and temporal domains are selected and shifted in a discourse in accordance with contextual factors such as the presence of overt time expressions, topic change, shared knowledge, and so on. This paper also affirms that tense interpretation is pragmatically shaped. Though times denoted by the tensed verbs in the clauses connected with when do not accurately overlap, the use of when is licensed by a pragmatic constraint which makes it possible to ignore minute temporal details.