Association for Behavior Analysis International

The term tense is commonly used to denote the time when an action referred to in an utterance takes place. Although this notion may seem straightforward, a behavior-analytic interpretation reveals that tense is more than a simple tact of the time of an action. Tense responses are made in relation to the moment of speaking (or emission of the response) and are therefore deictic, relative to the speaker's present. The particular temporal features that are responded to differ from one verbal community to another. Linguists have studied these differences extensively, and within linguistics such studies comprise the subfield known as linguistic typology. Typological studies have never been done from a behavior-analytic theoretical view, but this paper will attempt to do so. Besides reviewing the variations of temporal relations different verbal communities respond to, this paper examines the types of response topographies community members use for tense responses. With better descriptions of contextual variables controlling tense responses and their corresponding topographies, behavior analysts will more effectively work on questions of how verbal behavior is learned.