Taking stance through grammar

Abstract Non-referential uses of deictic expressions are those whose primary motivation does not lie in relating a referent to the situation of speech, but rather in suggesting a particular attitude on the part of the speaker. Together, they can be described as grammatical means of taking stance. They illustrate the disposition of grammatical categories to harvest expressive functions as part of their meaning potential. Such uses are typically relegated to the realm of pragmatics as a function of the interaction between an expression’s “canonical” semantics and features of the context. However, I present a case where the modal, non-temporal meaning characterizing uses of a grammatical marker of time can in fact be analyzed as an integral part of its semantic make-up.