Modality, Futurity and Dependent Tense: The Semantics of the Serbian Perfective Nonpast and Future 2

Barbara Partee's seminal 1973 article analyzing the structural analogies between tenses and pronouns, changed the direction in tense theory towards a referential approach, one in which tenses refer directly to temporal entities (Partee 1973; Enc 1987; Abusch 1998, 2004; Giannakidou forthcoming a, forthcoming b). This approach has the advantage of being able to account for the context dependency of tense: its identification with times supplied by the discourse or by higher sentential structure. In the absence of a contextual point of reference, independent tenses are identified in relation to the utterance time.