Past tense reference to the future ...

The simple past in Dutch, as in many other European languages, is not necessarily used to refer to a past eventuality. A Dutch example of a verb in simple past that does not refer to a past event, taken from the Spoken Dutch Corpus (CGN), is: "Pa die ging morgen golfen" ‘Dad is going to play golf tomorrow.’ Here, the past tense verb ging ‘went’ can be called a ‘fake past’, since it refers to a future eventuality, as can be seen from the adverb tomorrow. We argue that this use of the past tense is not modal, because it does not involve reference to a counterfactual, hypothetical, or unlikely ev... Mehr ...