Other Times, Other Worlds
About the Cluster
Language allows us to describe not only what we observe but also anything we can imagine. We can talk about situations other than the here-and-now and the actual. The modal language of possibility and necessity does not just concern what is, but what could be, or must be. The language of temporality engages not just with the present but also with the past and future: we speak about what was before and predict what will be after. And since the future is unsettled, unlike the past, talk about the future is intrinsically both temporal and modal. But the past too is open to imagined alternatives: what could have been, or what should have been. Other linguistic phenomena beyond tenses and modals appear to shift what is being talked about from the actual: we can shift to what is believed to be not by us but by other agents, or to what is said to be in a fictional narrative.
Linguists and philosophers of language have long been interested in the possibilities that these shifts from the actual afford us, and have studied how these shifts are performed through a variety of linguistic mechanisms. A common approach is to model these phenomena with worlds and times other than the actual ones. If you have evidence that leads you to infer that there was a lion on the loose, you could capture this inference by noting that the worlds compatible with your evidence are all worlds in which at a past time a lion was on the loose. And this relationship between the worlds that are connected to your present evidence obtains whether or not, in reality, there were any escaped lions in the vicinity in the past. The linguistic devices of worlds and times allow us to evaluate the truth of inferences without knowledge of what occurs in actuality.
At UCSC, semanticists in linguistics, and formally inclined philosophers of language in philosophy, have worked on various aspects of the semantics and metaphysics of modality, temporality and fiction. Phenomena of overlap include the future, beliefs and other dispositions, conditionals, types of evidence and inferences, temporal expressions such as now and then, before and after, temporal interpretation without overt tense. It is not very common across linguistics and philosophy departments to have as many potential research connections as we do. And uniquely, most of us share a research interest in the language of fiction, and more broadly in narratives.
We appear to use the same linguistic toolkit to tell stories that we do in daily conversations. But how do we evaluate truth in fiction? A modal perspective on fiction is useful: we can say that claims about fictional characters are true or false relative to the worlds compatible with the story, and as with the lion on the loose, our actual world need not be among those worlds. Is the same analysis then appropriate for non-fictional personal narratives that purport to describe actual events? Some answers can be found in the behavior of linguistic elements sensitive to the presence of modals outside of narratives, such as tenses, aspects, pronouns. The semanticists and philosophers at UCSC have explored these questions in work on time travel, discourse relations and aspect in present-tense narratives, the interpretation of gendered pronouns. A collaborative cross-disciplinary perspective on these issues will deepen our understanding.
Our research cluster brings together UCSC linguists and philosophers, to work together on better understanding how language handles shifts to other times and other worlds. More specifically, we engage with each other about temporal language, modal language, and fictional language. Our shared interests and diverse methods and perspectives offer the opportunity of a transformative collaboration.
Co-Principal Investigators
Pranav Anand, Professor of Linguistics
Sara Bernstein, Professor of Philosophy
Daniel Nolan, Professor of Philosophy
Roumyana Pancheva, Professor of Linguistics
Maziar Toosarvandani, Professor of Linguistics
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