On Non-Grammaticality, "Speaker Ghosting", and the Raison D’être of English Sequence of Tenses (SOT)

Abstract

The sequence of tenses (SOT) phenomenon has so far remained a mystery both across languages and in English, where its observation often triggers sentences contradicting reality. This forces linguists to define it as bizarre or "useless". The analysis of English SOT is based on Bulgarian data that reveal that a huge number of sentences falling into certain schemata, similar to English prototypical examples of SOT observation, are entirely non-grammatical. There exists an intriguing parallelism between certain sentence types in Bulgarian and English: exactly diametrically opposing cases of non-grammaticality. The non-grammaticality of the Bulgarian sentences is explained through a phenomenon called "speaker ghosting". This is partly applied to English data. A reinterpretation of English SOT is proposed: not a "mysterious rule" but, simply, a grammatical mood, and the raison d’être of English backshift mood (SOT) is identified: a crucially important device to prevent the elimination of non-cancelable content.