BETWEEN HYPOTAXIS AND TENSE

Hypotaxis can be described as the relationship which exists between two clauses in which one is subordinate to the other. Simply put, hypotaxis is the relationship between the clauses in any kind of complex sentence.

For instance, the  relationship between 'he had left' and 'before I came' in 'He had left before I came' is that of hypotaxis where the latter clause is subordinate to (that is, less in semantic and grammatical importance than) the former clause.

One of the relationship that we may trace between two clauses in hypotactic relationship is tense.

Tense may be said to be the grammaticalisation of time in language. It is such a concept by which we understand when an action is done or how a process is to be construed in terms of a relative temporal construct. It such aids our understand of the world through language that we are able to conveniently say that a speaker or a writer is speaking about the past, the present, or the future. It is also through tense that we know that an action precedes another action In time. It is through it that we know that 'he had left' precedes 'before I came' in time.

Now, let us examinine the following sentences:

>> I thought I HAVE finally arrived there.

>> I thought I HAD finally arrived there.

One phenomenon common to clauses in hypotactic relationship is tense sequencing or tense agreement. It is usually said that both clauses should agree in tense such that we do not have something like *'He had left before I come'. By this kind of requirement, the first sentence would be grammatically out of place.

To further explain this, we could use the following analogical examples:

>> I thought you COME yesterday.

>> I thought you CAME yesterday.

By what we have established and our own knowledge of grammatics, we would consider the first sentence as a grammatical aberration while we hold the second as grammatically O.K. Why? It is because there is a clean-cut marker of time 'yesterday'. Let us now go back to the sentences in our focus and introduce a clean-cut marker of time:

>> I thought I HAVE finally arrived there last year.

>> I thought I HAD finally arrived there last year.

However, there may be time when the tenses of the two clauses would not correspond. Example:

>> This IS the town where I STAYED last year

Here, the tense of the main clause 'This is the town' in the present tense does not correspond with the subordinate clause 'where I stayed last year' which is in past tense.

At any rate, the complex sentence ' I thought I had I finally arrived there.' should be considerd as grammatically faultless and held appropriate based on the foregoing observations of the structures of the English sentence.