Past Tense transportation in English

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Abstract
Poutsma (1926: 441–447) says of sentences like: (I) I could have got the money easily enough. that ‘the notion of completed action in this combination [is expressed] not in the finite verb, where it logically belongs, but in the following infinitive’. He speaks of this phenomenon as ‘tense-shifting’; I have preferred ‘past tense transportation’ (PTT) in order to make it clear that it is only the Past Tense that is involved, I and to avoid confusion with the quite different but more frequent use of ‘tense- shifting’ in accounts of the ‘sequence of tenses’ in indirect speech, etc., where a direct speech non-Past is commonly said to be ‘backshifted’ to a Past Tense (She is ill ∽ He said she was ill).

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