In this article we tackle the issue of diachronic variation in constructional semantics through an exploration of the (recent) semantic history of the well-established English ditransitive or double object argument structure construction. Starting from the assumption that schematic syntactic patterns are not fundamentally different from lexical items, we will show that — similar to the diachronic semantic development of lexemes — the semantics of argument structure constructions in general and that of double object constructions in particular, is (...) vulnerable to semasiological shifts as well. More specifically, the analysis, which compares data from 18th-century Late Modern English with present-day English, shows that the double object construction's semantic evolution presents a case of specialization, in which the construction has come to be associated with a significantly narrower range of meanings. It will further be argued that such patterns of semantic change are best captured in a model of argument structure semantics which discriminates between central and lesscentral or prototypical and non-prototypical uses. (shrink)

This edited book brings together research work in the field of constructive semantics with scholarship on the phenomenological foundations of logic and mathematics. It addresses one of the central issues in the epistemology and philosophy of mathematics, namely the relationship between phenomenological meaning constitution and constructive semantics. Contributing authors explore deep structural connections and fundamental differences between phenomenology and constructivism. Papers are drawn from contributions to a prestigious workshop held at the University of Friedrichshafen. Readers will discover insight (...) into structural connections between the phenomenological concept of meaning constitution and constructivist concepts of meaning. Discussion ranges from more specific conceptualizations in the philosophy of logic and mathematics to more general considerations in epistemology, inferential semantics and phenomenology. Questions such as a possible phenomenological understanding of the relationship between structural rules and particle rules in dialogical logic are explored. Significant aspects of both phenomenology and dialectics, and dialectics and constructivism emerge. Graduates and researchers of philosophy, especially logic, as well as scholars of mathematics will all find something of interest in the expert insights presented in this volume. (shrink)

Computational models of semantic memory exploit information about co-occurrences of words in naturally occurring text to extract information about the meaning of the words that are present in the language. Such models implicitly specify a representation of temporal context. Depending on the model, words are said to have occurred in the same context if they are presented within a moving window, within the same sentence, or within the same document. The temporal context model (TCM), which specifies a particular definition of (...) temporal context, has proved useful in the study of episodic memory. The predictive temporal context model (pTCM) uses the same definition of temporal context to generate semantic memory representations. Taken together pTCM and TCM may prove to be part of a general model of declarative memory. (shrink)

This paper provides a constructive topological semantics for non-deducibility of a first order intuitionistic formula. Formal topology theory, in particular the recently introduced notion of a binary positivity predicate, and co-induction are two needful tools.

A number of recent models of semantics combine linguistic information, derived from text corpora, and visual information, derived from image collections, demonstrating that the resulting multimodal models are better than either of their unimodal counterparts, in accounting for behavioral data. Empirical work on semantic processing has shown that emotion also plays an important role especially in abstract concepts; however, models integrating emotion along with linguistic and visual information are lacking. Here, we first improve on visual and affective representations, derived (...) from state‐of‐the‐art existing models, by choosing models that best fit available human semantic data and extending the number of concepts they cover. Crucially then, we assess whether adding affective representations (obtained from a neural network model designed to predict emojis from co‐occurring text) improves the model's ability to fit semantic similarity/relatedness judgments from a purely linguistic and linguistic–visual model. We find that, given specific weights assigned to the models, adding both visual and affective representations improves performance, with visual representations providing an improvement especially for more concrete words, and affective representations improving especially the fit for more abstract words. (shrink)

In 1933 Godel introduced a calculus of provability (also known as modal logic S4) and left open the question of its exact intended semantics. In this paper we give a solution to this problem. We find the logic LP of propositions and proofs and show that Godel's provability calculus is nothing but the forgetful projection of LP. This also achieves Godel's objective of defining intuitionistic propositional logic Int via classical proofs and provides a Brouwer-Heyting-Kolmogorov style provability semantics for (...) Int which resisted formalization since the early 1930s. LP may be regarded as a unified underlying structure for intuitionistic, modal logics, typed combinatory logic and λ-calculus. (shrink)

In this article we firstly present a Kripke semantics for the description logic ALC which is directly inspired by the semantics for Intuitionistic logic. Moreover, we discuss why a direct translation of this kind of semantics is not adequate in the description logic context and propose a constructive semantics that differs from the previous one by the fact that we impose a condition on the partial order. We also present a tableau calculus which is sound and (...) complete with respect to our semantics. As an application of the calculus we prove that this semantics meets the disjunction property, a key criterion used in assessing whether a logic is constructive. (shrink)

Editorial NoteThis lecture was given by Per Martin-Löf at Leiden University on August 25, 2001 at the invitation by Göran Sundholm to address the topic mentioned in the title and to reflect on Dummett’s earlier effort of almost a decade before. The lecture was part of a three-day conference on Gottlob Frege. Sundholm arranged for the lecture to be recorded and commissioned Bjørn Jespersen to make a transcript. The information in footnote 1, which Sundholm provided, has been independently confirmed by (...) Thomas Ricketts in an email to the author. The present version has been edited by Ansten Klev. Following the displayed text there is a lacuna in the original transcript corresponding to a pause in the recording when the tape was changed. The continuous text of the present version is the result of a few additions to the original transcript suggested by Klev and agreed to by the author. (shrink)

Regarding constructivism as a learning philosophy and/or a model of knowing, a person (learner or mentor) based on her/ his preconceptions and on personal knowings could actively participate in an interaction with another person (learner or mentor) in order to construct her/his personal knowledge. In this research I will analyse 'meaning construction' within constructivism. I will focus on a semantic loop that the learner and mentor as intentional participants move through and organise their personal constructed conceptions in order to (...) construct meanings and produce their individual meaningful comprehensions. Subsequently, I will provide a semantic framework for analysing the meaning construction based on personal knowings and personal conceptions within constructivist interactions. This research could propose a new scheme for interpretation based on semantics and on interaction. (shrink)

Semantic Leaps explores how people combine knowledge from different domains in order to understand and express new ideas. Concentrating on dynamic aspects of on-line meaning construction, Coulson identifies two related sets of processes: frame-shifting and conceptual blending. Frame-shifting is semantic reanalysis in which existing elements in the contextual representation are reorganized into a new frame. Conceptual blending is a set of cognitive operations for combining partial cognitive models. By addressing linguistic phenomena often ignored in traditional meaning research, Coulson explains (...) how processes of cross-domain mapping, frame-shifting, and conceptual blending enhance the explanatory adequacy of traditional frame-based systems for natural language processing. The focus is on how the constructive processes speakers use to assemble, link, and adapt simple cognitive models underlie a broad range of productive language behavior. (shrink)

Sheaf semantics is developed within a constructive and predicative framework, Martin‐Löf's type theory. We prove strong completeness of many sorted, first order intuitionistic logic with respect to this semantics, by using sites of provably functional relations.

In a first part, I defend that formal semantics can be used as a guide to ontological commitment. Thus, if one endorses an ontological view $O$ and wants to interpret a formal language $L$ , a thorough understanding of the relation between semantics and ontology will help us to construct a semantics for $L$ in such a way that its ontological commitment will be in perfect accordance with $O$ . Basically, that is what I call constructing formal (...) semantics from an ontological perspective. In the rest of the paper, I develop rigorously and put into practice such a method, especially concerning the interpretation of second-order quantification. I will define the notion of ontological framework: it is a set-theoretical structure from which one can construct semantics whose ontological commitments correspond exactly to a given ontological view. I will define five ontological frameworks corresponding respectively to: (i) predicate nominalism, (ii) resemblance nominalism, (iii) armstrongian realism, (iv) platonic realism, and (v) tropism. From those different frameworks, I will construct different semantics for first-order and second-order languages. Notably I will present different kinds of nominalist semantics for second-order languages, showing thus that we can perfectly quantify over properties and relations while being ontologically committed only to individuals. I will show in what extent those semantics differ from each other; it will make clear how the disagreements between the ontological views extend from ontology to logic, and thus why endorsing an ontological view should have an impact on the kind of logic one should use. (shrink)

1st GPMR Workshop on Logic and Semantics: Medieval Logic and Modern Applied Logic, Reinische Friedrich Wilhelms Universität Bonn, Germany, 2007.

(1) is an example of an adjectival comparative. In it, the adjective important is flanked by more and a comparative clause headed by than. This article is a survey of recent ideas about the interpretation of comparatives, including (i) the underlying semantics based on the idea of a threshold; (ii) the interpretation of comparative clauses that include quantifiers (brighter than on many other days); (iii) remarks on differentials such as much in (1) above: what they do in the comparative (...) and what they do elsewhere in the language; (iv) the relationship between comparatives and other Degree constructions (e.g. as important, too impor- tant); and (v) the types of phrases in which comparatives are found (adjective: tighter versus noun: more water). Given the nature and purpose of this essay, I have tried not to presuppose background in formal semantics and I have departed from standard practice in journal articles by, as much as possible, not interrupting the flow with footnotes and references. There are two appendices. The first provides more analytical detail and there I do rely on formal techniques of natural language semantics. The second covers the sources for the ideas surveyed here. (shrink)

A semantics for quantified modal logic is presented that is based on Kleene's notion of realizability. This semantics generalizes Flagg's 1985 construction of a model of a modal version of Church's Thesis and first-order arithmetic. While the bulk of the paper is devoted to developing the details of the semantics, to illustrate the scope of this approach, we show that the construction produces (i) a model of a modal version of Church's Thesis and a variant (...) of a modal set theory due to Goodman and Scedrov, (ii) a model of a modal version of Troelstra's generalized continuity principle together with a fragment of second-order arithmetic, and (iii) a model based on Scott's graph model (for the untyped lambda calculus) which witnesses the failure of the stability of non-identity. (shrink)

We use formal semantic analysis based on new constructions to study abstract realizability, introduced by Läuchli in 1970, and expose its algebraic content. We claim realizability so conceived generates semantics-based intuitive confidence that the Heyting Calculus is an appropriate system of deduction for constructive reasoning.Well-known semantic formalisms have been defined by Kripke and Beth, but these have no formal concepts corresponding to constructions, and shed little intuitive light on the meanings of formulae. In particular, the completeness proofs for these (...) semantics do not generate confidence in the sufficiency of the Heyting Calculus, since we have no reason to believe that every intuitively constructive truth is valid in the formal semantics.Läuchli has proved completeness for a realizability semantics with formal concepts analogous to constructions. We argue in some detail that, in spite of a certain inherent inexactness of the analogy, every intuitively constructive truth is valid in Läuchli semantics, and therefore the Heyting Calculus is powerful enough to prove all constructive truths. Our argument is based on the postulate that a uniformly constructible object must be communicable in spite of imprecision in our language, and that the permutations in Läuchli's semantics represent conceivable imprecision in a language, while allowing a certain amount of freedom in choosing the particular structure of the language.We give a detailed generalization of Läuchli's proof of completeness for the propositional part of the Heyting Calculus, in order to make explicit constructive and algebraic content.In our treatment, we establish several new results about Läuchli models. We show how to extend the sconing and gluing constructions familiar from Kripke and Frame semantics and Topos theory, to Läuchli models, and use them to give an algebraic approach to countermodel construction. In particular, the Läuchli arguments are given without the restriction to the integers, Z, as a group of permutations, which makes much of the coding scheme used in Läuchli's original paper transparent.We also make use of a new propositions-as-types syntax for the Heyting calculus, with limited nondeterminism, in which validity of formulae can be decided without loop-detection. (shrink)

We introduce a general notion of semantic structure for first-order theories, covering a variety of constructions such as Tarski and Kripke semantics, and prove that, over Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory, the completeness of such semantics is equivalent to the Boolean prime ideal theorem. Using a result of McCarty, we conclude that the completeness of Kripke semantics is equivalent, over intuitionistic Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory, to the Law of Excluded Middle plus BPI. Along the way, we also prove the equivalence, (...) over ZF, between BPI and the completeness theorem for Kripke semantics for both first-order and propositional theories. (shrink)

In (1b), for the most part induces a so-called Quantificational Variability Effect (QVE) on the NP the linguists from the East Coast, yielding roughly the interpretation ‘most of the linguists from the East Coast came to NELS’. We claim that the two constructions above differ in the domain where they apply, producing similar but not identical quantificational interpretations over the NP. In particular, we argue that most of the NPs applies to the nominal domain, while for the most part applies (...) to the verbal domain. Our claim is based on two sets of novel semantic data. First, we show that the distribution of most of the NPs is parallel to that of all the NPs in terms of its selective compatibility with collective predicates. To account for this data, we extend Brisson’s (1998, 2003) analysis of all the NPs to most of the NPs, concluding that most is an ∃-quantifier introducing a group of a certain proportion. Second, we show that, when for the most part gives rise to a QVE on a definite NP, the collective interpretation is not available. We develop a semantic analysis of for the most part as a verbal modifier that explains the lack of collective readings and that extends to interpretations other than QVE. The structure of the paper is as follows: in section 2, we introduce some general background on events and distributivity that are relevant to the current paper. In section 3, we propose the analysis of most of the NPs, followed by the analysis of for the most part in section 4. Section 5 concludes the paper and discusses further issues. (shrink)

This paper investigates whether an abstract linguistic construction shows the kind of prototype effects characteristic of non-linguistic categories, in both adults and young children. Adapting the prototype-plus-distortion methodology of Franks and Bransford (1971), we found that whereas adults were lured toward false-positive recognition of sentences with prototypical transitive semantics, young children showed no such effect. We examined two main implications of the results. First, it adds a novel data point to a growing body of research in cognitive linguistics (...) and construction grammar that shows abstract linguistic categories can behave in similar ways to non-linguistic categories, for example, by showing graded membership of a category. Thus, the findings lend psychological validity to the existing cross-linguistic evidence for prototypical transitive semantics. Second, we discuss a possible explanation for the fact that prototypical sentences were processed differently in adults and children, namely, that children’s transitive semantic network is not as interconnected or cognitively coherent as adults’. (shrink)

Among Dunn’s many important contributions to relevance logic was his work on the system RM (R-mingle). Although RM is an interesting system in its own right, it is widely considered to be too strong. In this chapter, I revisit a closely related system, RM0 (sometimes known as ‘constructive mingle’), which includes the mingle axiom while not degenerating in the way that RM itself does. My main interest will be in examining this logic from two related semantical perspectives. First, I give (...) a purely operational bisemilattice semantics for it by adapting previous work of Humberstone. Second, I examine a more conventional algebraic semantics for it and discuss how this relates to the operational semantics. A novel operational semantics for J (intuitionistic logic) as well as its conventional Heyting algebraic semantics emerge as special cases of the corresponding semantics for RM0. The results of this chapter suggest that RM0 is a more interesting logic than has been appreciated and that Humberstone’s operational semantic framework similarly deserves more attention than it has received. (shrink)

Montague’s framework for semantic interpretation has always been less well adapted to the interpretation of words than of syntactic constructions. In the late 1970s, David Dowty addressed this problem, concentrating on the interpretation of tense, aspect, inchoatives, and causatives in an extension of Montague’s Intensional Logic. In this paper I will try to revive this project, conceiving it as part of a larger task aiming at the interpretation of derivational morphology. I will try to identity some obstacles arising in Dowty’s (...) approach, and will suggest an alternative approach that, while it does not provide a global interpretation of causality, seems to work well with a wide range of the causal constructions that are important in word formation. I try to relate these ideas to some themes in contemporary philosophy and in the formalization of commonsense reasoning. (shrink)

I present a semantics for the language of first-order additive-multiplicative linear logic, i.e. the language of classical first-order logic with two sorts of disjunction and conjunction. The semantics allows us to capture intuitions often associated with linear logic or constructivism such as sentences = games, SENTENCES = resources or sentences = problems, where “truth” means existence of an effective winning strategy.The paper introduces a decidable first-order logic ET in the above language and gives a proof of its soundness (...) and completeness with respect to this semantics. Allowing noneffective strategies in the latter is shown to lead to classical logic.The semantics presented here is very similar to Blass's game semantics. Although there is no straightforward reduction between the two corresponding notions of validity, my completeness proof can likely be adapted to the logic induced by Blass's semantics to show its decidability, which was the main problem left open in Blass's paper.The reader needs to be familiar with classical logic and arithmetic. (shrink)

In constructing semantic theories of normative and evaluative terms, philosophers have commonly deployed a certain type of disagreement -based argument. The premise of the argument observes the possibility of genuine disagreement between users of a certain normative or evaluative term, while the conclusion of the argument is that, however differently those speakers employ the term, they must mean the same thing by it. After all, if they did not, then they would not really disagree. We argue that in many of (...) the cases in which this argument is deployed, the conclusion not only fails to follow from the premises, but is very likely false. Disagreements between speakers who do not mean the same things by their words are common, genuine, and not easily distinguished from ordinary disagreements over the truth of literally expressed content. We make this case by developing the notion of a metalinguistic negotiation, an exchange in which speakers tacitly negotiate the proper deployment of some linguistic expression in a context. Metalinguistic negotiations express disagreements over information that is conveyed pragmatically and about what concepts should be deployed in the context at hand. We argue that neither of these features poses any obstacle to metalinguistic negotiations serving to express genuine, substantive disagreements that can be well worth engaging in. Contrary to what has been widely assumed in the literature, many normative and evaluative disputes—among ordinary speakers and even among philosophers themselves—may be of exactly this type, a conclusion with important consequences for both the subject matter and the methodology of metanormative theory. (shrink)

The article discusses the methodology for studying reflective systems, which are very specific objects of study. However, such objects include almost all phenomena of the socio-humanitarian sciences, including scientific knowledge. It is noted that in the era of the “sixties” original concepts of reflexive analysis arose in Russian philosophy, among which the three most striking ones, associated with the names of V.A. Lefebvre (1936-2020), G.P. Shchedrovitsky (1929-1994), M.A. Rozova (1930-2011). The main attention is paid to the methodology that was built (...) within the framework of the theory of social relay races by M.A. Rosova. It is shown how systems with reflection function and why they are able to rebuild, changing the order of sociality. (shrink)

This paper presents a constructive interpretation for the proofs in classical logic of $\Sigma^0_1$ -sentences and for a witness extraction procedure based on Prawitz's reduction rules.

Split constructions are widespread in natural languages. The separation of the semantic restriction of a quantifier from that quantifier is a typical example of such a construction. This study addresses the problem that such discontinuous strings exhibit--namely, a number of locality constraints, including intervention effects. These are shown to follow from the interaction of a minimalist syntax with a semantics that directly assigns a model-theoretic interpretation to syntactic logical forms. The approach is shown to have wide empirical coverage (...) and a conceptual simplicity. The book will be of interest to scholars and advanced students of syntax and semantics. (shrink)

First published in 1997, this book addresses the question: What is the interpretation of English there-existential construction? One of the principal goals is to develop an interpretation for the construction that will specifically address other properties of the postcopular DP. After outlining the problem, the author goes on to present a syntactic motivation for the claim that the postcopular DP is the sole complement to the existential predicate, as well as for the claim that the optional final phrase (...) is a predictive adjunct. In chapter 3 the interpretation for the basic existential construction is developed and then compared to analyses that take the postcopular DP to denote an ordinary individual or a generalised quantifier of individuals. This analysis is then augmented to account for the contribution of the final XP and shows how the predicate restriction can be derived from a more general condition on depictive/circumstantial VP-adjuncts. The final chapter contain some speculative discussion of the broader implications of the proposal in the context of data such as "list" existential and "presentational-there" sentences. (shrink)

This paper introduces three model-theoretic constructions for generalized Epstein semantics: reducts, ultramodels and $\textsf {S}$ -sets. We apply these notions to obtain metatheoretical results. We prove connective inexpressibility by means of a reduct, compactness by an ultramodel and definability theorem which states that a set of generalized Epstein models is definable iff it is closed under ultramodels and $\textsf {S}$ -sets. Furthermore, a corollary concerning definability of a set of models by a single formula is given on the basis (...) of the main theorem and the compactness theorem. We also provide an example of a natural set of generalized Epstein models which is undefinable. Its undefinability is proven by means of an $\textsf {S}$ -set. (shrink)

Distributional models of lexical semantics are capable of acquiring sophisticated representations of word meanings. The main theoretical insight provided by these models is that they demonstrate the systematic connection between the knowledge that people acquire and the experience that they have with the natural language environment. However, linguistic experience is inherently variable and differs radically across people due to demographic and cultural variables. Recently, distributional models have been used to examine how word meanings vary across languages and it was (...) found that there is considerable variability in the meanings of words across languages for most semantic categories. The goal of this article is to examine how variable word meanings are across individual language users within a single language. This was accomplished by assembling 500 individual user corpora attained from the online forum Reddit. Each user corpus ranged between 3.8 and 32.3 million words each, and a count‐based distributional framework was used to extract word meanings for each user. These representations were then used to estimate the semantic alignment of word meanings across individual language users. It was found that there are significant levels of relativity in word meanings across individuals, and these differences are partially explained by other psycholinguistic factors, such as concreteness, semantic diversity, and social aspects of language usage. These results point to word meanings being fundamentally relative and contextually fluid, with this relativeness being related to the individualized nature of linguistic experience. (shrink)

Measuring event-related potentials (ERPs) has been fundamental to our understanding of how language is encoded in the brain. One particular ERP response, the N400 response, has been especially influential as an index of lexical and semantic processing. However, there remains a lack of consensus on the interpretation of this component. Resolving this issue has important consequences for neural models of language comprehension. Here we show that evidence bearing on where the N400 response is generated provides key insights into what it (...) reflects. A neuroanatomical model of semantic processing is used as a guide to interpret the pattern of activated regions in functional MRI, magnetoencephalography and intracranial recordings that are associated with contextual semantic manipulations that lead to N400 effects. (shrink)

A central question for ontology is the question of whether numbers really exist. But it seems easy to answer this question in the affirmative. The truth of a sentence like ‘Seven students came to the party’ can be established simply by looking around at the party and counting students. A trivial paraphrase of is ‘The number of students who came to the party is seven’. But appears to entail the existence of a number, and so it seems that we must (...) conclude that numbers exist. This is sometimes called the puzzle of how we can get something from nothing. Most extant attempts to solve the puzzle take it for granted that is ontologically innocent, and focus their attention either on or on the transition from to. We argue that both attempts go wrong at the first step: the assumption that is ontologically innocent is undermined by a highly attractive and independently well-motivated degree-based account of number word constructions. Thus the degree-based account provides a straightforward linguistic resolution of the puzzle of how we can get something from nothing. But the paper also has a second aim. The semantics we present treats ‘seven’ as a referring expression that refers to a degree of a certain sort. But what are degrees? We consider various anti-platonist proposals that seek to account for degrees in terms of relations between concrete entities, and argue that they are incompatible with the Universal Density of Measurement hypothesis of Fox and Hackl. While the UDM cannot yet claim to be the consensus view among degree-based semanticists, our aim is to use it to illustrate how views about the nature of degrees can be evaluated by considering the properties degrees must have if they are to play the explanatory roles they are called upon to play in linguistics. In the present state of development of degree-based semantics there are difficult open questions about what these properties are. These questions need to be addressed if we are to develop a clear picture of what natural language semantics has to contribute to ontology and metaphysics. (shrink)

Questo contributo tratta della perifrasi ‘εἶναι + participio’ in greco omerico all’interfaccia fra morfosintassi e semantica. I dati sono analizzati con riferimento al quadro teorico elaborato da Nardi e Romagno (2022), che considerano la perifrasi con εἶναι in greco antico come una categoria prototipica: secondo questa prospettiva, la categoria sovraordinata ‘εἶναι + participio’ include due manifestazioni formalmente diverse ma funzionalmente equivalenti, un costrutto con una copula espressa, cioè una perifrasi vera e propria, e un costrutto senza copula espressa, cioè un (...) participio predicativo (fondamentalmente, un participio che funziona come una forma finita). Questa indagine mira a valutare se si possano individuare fattori che determinano o soggiacciono all’uso di queste costruzioni participiali in greco omerico. L’analisi dei dati raccolti nei poemi omerici mostra che le costruzioni participiali codificano la funzione specifica di significare lo stato, inerente o acquisito, del soggetto del predicato, costituendo pertanto un’alternativa (più o meno libera) al perfetto originario (cfr. Romagno 2005). (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to show that topoi are useful in the categorial analysis of the constructive logic with strong negation. In any topos ϵ we can distinguish an object Λ and its truth-arrows such that sets ϵ have a Nelson algebra structure. The object Λ is defined by the categorial counterpart of the algebraic FIDEL-VAKARELOV construction. Then it is possible to define the universal quantifier morphism which permits us to make the first order predicate calculus. The (...) completeness theorem is proved using the Kripke-type semantic defined by THOMASON. (shrink)

This paper delves into the temporal interpretation of fronting constructions in English, a topic that has received limited attention in the literature on tense semantics. It presents new empirical findings revealing that specific fronting configurations, involving present tense morphology in a complement CP under a matrix past tense, can yield a theoretically unexpected simultaneous interpretation. A novel theoretical framework for understanding English tense is proposed, which accounts for the temporal interpretation of both fronting and non-fronting versions of attitude reports. (...) The framework introduces a null simultaneous tense as a replacement for the conventional indexical present and the Sequence-of-Tense (SOT) _de se_ tense. It is argued that in complement CPs the null simultaneous tense, as well as past tense, can be anchored either to the attitude time or to the utterance time. In either case, each tense receives a _de re_ interpretation. Moreover, the paper contends that evidence from fronting constructions supports Kratzer’s (Proceedings of semantics and linguistic theory 8, pp. 92–110, 1998 ) proposal that the transmission of temporal features (as part of the mechanism of SOT) occurs at PF. Finally, the proposed revision of the English tense system contributes to a more unified cross-linguistic perspective on tense. It is demonstrated how the temporal readings of attitude reports arising in such non-SOT languages as Russian, Japanese, and Hebrew can be captured within the system developed for English, with known contrasts attributed to the absence of Feature Transmission in those languages. Further known and new data from English, Modern Greek, and German are examined, revealing variations in SOT effects across SOT languages. These data are used as additional evidence supporting the claim that cross-linguistic variation in the interpretation of complement tense stems solely from differences in Feature Transmission. Regarding the semantic profile of tenses, it can be considered largely invariant. (shrink)