Correlating Cessation with Double Access

Abstract

This paper investigates an inference (which we call cessation) that no state of the kind described currently holds. We propose that this inference occurs in a sentence ϕ when: (a) ϕ has stative verb in the past tense and (b) there is a present tense alternative to ϕ that shares a common reference time concept and is not vacuously false. We show how (a) and (b) correlate with the availability of the so-called double access reading, found in present-under-past reports and which we analyze by building on an analysis of tense proposed by Musan (1995). The novelty of our analysis is that the present tense in English is an amalgam of both a relative and a deictic present. More concretely, the English present poses presuppositional constraints on the reference time concept which demand truth at the local evaluation time and at or after the speech time. An important consequence of our analysis is the following conjecture: intuitions about so-called simultaneous readings in past-under-past reports are really intuitions about the absence of cessation.