This section discusses the notions of tense, modality and aspect as encoded in the Dutch verbal system by means of inflection and non-main verbs and shows how these means interact to produce a wide range of interpretational effects. Section 1.5.1 begins with a discussion of the traditional view on the Dutch tense system, which basically follows a proposal in Te Winkel (1866) that distinguishes eight different tenses on the basis of the three binary oppositions in (259); cf. also Haeseryn et al. (1997:111-3).

The three oppositions in (259) define the eight tenses listed in Table 8. The labels in the cells are those we will use in this study; the abbreviations in brackets refer to traditional Dutch terminology and are added for the convenience of the Dutch reader.

Section 1.5.2 discusses epistemic modal verbs like moetenmust and kunnenmay and argues that the distinction between future and non-future tenses in Table 8, which is traditionally attributed to the presence or absence of the verb zullenwill, is in fact not overtly expressed by the Dutch verbal tense system, but arises from pragmatic considerations as a side-effect of the system of epistemic modality. We will conclude from this that the Dutch verbal tense system encodes only two of the three binary oppositions by morphological and syntactic means, namely present versus past and perfect versus imperfect; the opposition future versus non-future is expressed by other means. In short, the Dutch verbal system overtly expresses no more than four of the eight tenses in Table 8. Section 1.5.3 continues with a brief discussion of aspectual verbs such as the inchoative verb beginnento begin. Section 1.5.4 concludes by showing how the future interpretation, as well as a wide range of non-temporal interpretations of the four tenses, is partly pragmatic in nature. We will show that they can be made to follow from the interaction between the temporal and modal information encoded in the sentence and the pragmatic principle known as the maxim of quantity (cf. the cooperative principle in Grice 1975), which prohibits the speaker from making his utterances more, or less, informative than the given context requires.