 Whereas Reichenbach’s analysis makes reference to a contextually salient point in time, on Prior’s account tenses are construed as temporal operators, which are interpreted as quantifiers over instants in time. This raises the general question: are tenses in natural language to be treated as quantifiers, or do they refer to specific points in time? In an influential paper, Partee (1973) provided the following counterexample against a quantifier treatment of tenses: the sentence “I didn’t turn off the stove” means neither (1) there is an earlier time instant at which I do not turn off the stove, nor does it mean (2) there is no earlier instant at which I turn off the stove. The first requirement is too weak, the second too strong. Partee suggested an analogy between tenses and referential pronouns. According to this proposal, tenses refer to specific, contextually given points in time (e.g. 8 o’clock this morning), which are presupposed to stand in appropriate temporal relations to the speech time. Subsequently, accounts that restrict quantification to a contextually given time interval (e.g. this morning) have become popular. On these accounts, Partee’s example sentence has the intuitive meaning: there is no earlier time instant in the contextually salient time interval at which I turn off the stove. Formally, this idea is compatible with both a quantifier and a referential treatment of tenses; for details see Kuhn and Portner (2002) and Ogihara (2011).