Tense and Evidence

This paper argues that tense is used to mark evidential source in English. Specifically, nonfuture tenses mark the speaker’s evidence as causally downstream from the event being described. This amounts to a linguistic solution to a puzzle recently posed by Dilip Ninan (“Assertion, evidence and the future,” The Philosophical Review, 2022). The analysis is principally supported by parallel phenomena in evidential systems of Bulgarian and Korean.