Suppose I assert, in no particular context, “Baby Jane had blue eyes.” How would a listener respond? Probably “Who cares?” But the curious might ask “Why doesn’t she still have blue eyes? What happened?” And I could answer “Her eye color was altered surgically,” or, “She’s dead now,” or even “I knew her long ago,” the third answer implying that one of the two others may be correct, but I don’t know which.

Bernard Comrie (Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics: Tense. Cambridge University Press, eighth printing, 2004) makes the point that, at least in English, a past-tense assertion does not imply anything about the state of affairs at the present time. So, according to Comrie, Baby Jane may still be alive, and may still have blue eyes; and I, the speaker, may even know these facts; and I still use “was.”

Logically, of course, Comrie is correct. But I don’t think that most English-speakers hear it that way, at least in America. Consider a different assertion: “I weighed 200 pounds.” In spite of grammar, I believe that most of us would jump to the logically unwarranted conclusion that I now weigh something other than 200. Comrie points out that English has an expression, “used to” to make it clear that things are different in the present. But most listeners or readers will still assume, reading “I weighed 200 pounds”, that my weight has changed, and that the change was worth mentioning.

How does this affect fiction? Simply this: In a work of fiction told in the past tense, a factual assertion is ambiguous as to whether or not it is true in the present (narrator-time) as well as true in the past (story-time). In some contexts this won’t matter: who cares what color Jane’s eyes are now? But in other contexts, it will matter. When it does, having to disambiguate the meaning can lead the writer into awkwardness of expression or rhythm in making clear exactly what he means.

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