Deixis and embedded tense: Revisiting tense in English and Japanese subordinate clauses

This paper examines how tense in embedded clauses interacts with the past tense of an embedding clause in English and Japanese. I propose that the tense morphology that surfaces in embedded clauses is a function of how the language anchors its clauses with respect to time and viewpoint. English is proposed to evaluate situations relative to the speech time as a result of the specification of a temporal deixis feature in T0. Japanese is argued to lack this particular feature, evaluating embedded clauses relative to the time of the matrix situation. Generalizations are made to capture sequence of tense phenomena.