Abstract
This paper provides a principled explanation of the mechanism of interpreting English tenses in indirect speech complement clauses. To this end, the paper proposes an interpretive principle which is based on two theories: a compositional tense theory and Hirose's (1995, 1997a, 1997b) theory of reported speech. The former theory requires a distinction between the level of tense structure and the level of tense interpretation, on one hand, and a distinction between the absolute and the relative tense component, on the other; the latter theory introduces the notions of public self and private self. It will be shown that the proposed principle can not only solve problems with previous analyses, but also account for a variety of related temporal phenomena in English indirect speech.
