Introduction: The Treatment of Tense

This workshop sought to discuss issues with respect to the treatment of tense which have arisen in recent years. By way of an introduction to the workshop, I first layed out the classic approach to the representation of temporal and aspectual information within LFG and then moved on to briefly present some of the more recent developments. In particular, recent work on nominal tense with clausal scope and nonconfigurational tense taken together with the well known problems surrounding the determination of compositional and relational tense, points to the need of a careful reconsideration of the issues involved. My introductory remarks are reproduced in this contribution.