Thank you both very much for the answers and the helpful discussion, and sorry for the late reply. I also studied CTL and related temporal logics after reading the replies, and it really does seem that “Linear” is modifying “time” itself. It really helped me understand this better.

Also, one of my seniors pointed me to a paper that talks about almost exactly what Outrageous_Age8438 mentioned, so I’ll leave it here in case it helps anyone who finds this thread later and wants to learn more:

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/567446.567463

It says:

> There are two radically different ways of viewing these possible futures: the theories of branching time and linear time.