Why bother about those tenses?

The paper is concerned with the Sequence of Tenses (SOT) under conditions of bilingualism. The authors undertook fieldwork among Maltese University students. Unlike the Maltese mass media in English, in which SOT is strictly observed, the majority of informants do not apply it. The non-observance of SOT could be the result of interference from their mother tongue (permanent code-switching in family interacting). It could also be due to the attitude of Maltese students – speakers of English as a second language – to the „errors“ in SOT, which they consider communicatively irrelevant.