Nobody’s Perfect

Abstract

This paper challenges the cross-linguistic validity of the tense–aspect category ‘perfect’ by investigating 15 languages from eight different families (Atayal, Brazilian Portuguese, Dutch, English, German, Gitksan, Japanese, Javanese, Korean, Mandarin, Niuean, Québec French, St’át’imcets, Swahili, and Tibetan). The methodology involves using the storyboard ‘Miss Smith’s Bad Day’ to test for the availability of experiential, resultative, recent-past, and continuous readings, as well as lifetime effects, result-state cancellability, narrative progression, and compatibility with definite time adverbials. Results show that the target forms in these languages can be classified into four groups: (a) past perfectives; (b) experientials; (c) resultatives; and (d) hybrids (which allow both experiential and resultative readings). It is argued that the main division is between past perfectives, which contain a ‘pronominal’ tense, on the one hand, and the other three groups on the other, which involve existential quantification, either over times (experiential) or over events (resultative). The methodological and typological implications of the findings are discussed. The main conclusion of the study is that there is no universal category of ‘the perfect’, and that instead, researchers should focus on identifying shared semantic components of tense–aspect categories across languages.

The Discovery of Aspect: A Heuristic Parallel Corpus Study of Ingressive, Continuative and Resumptive Viewpoint Aspect

“…Since (2a-c) may all translate to (1a), Dutch encodes progressive aspect in a less obligatory and systematic way than English does (cf. Bertrand et al 2022 for a similar juxtaposition of the English and Dutch present perfect constructions). guistic variation heuristically, remedying a basic methodological problem: identifying the means of expression for a conceptual category in a language that does not (evidently) encode that category obligatorily or systematically.…”

Decomposing Perfect Readings

“…e. Narrative progression allowed. (Bertrand et al 2017(Bertrand et al , 2022 The 'perfect'-forms in the semantic sense also show variation. For example, the Mandarin Chinese perfective particles guo and the sentence-final le are both associated with perfect-like readings, but they represent different subsets of the list in (1).…”

“…Many tense-aspectual constructions in the world's languages have been labeled as the 'perfect'. While there are many previous analyses focused on the English present perfect (Inoue 1979;McCawley 1971;McCoard 1978;Klein 1992Klein , 1994Iatridou et al 2003;Portner 2003Portner , 2011, to name a few) and other cross-linguistic studies comparing forms labeled as the 'perfect' (Grønn and Von Stechow 2017;Schaden 2009, among others), as the recent literature points out, the term 'perfect' itself may have several definitions Bertrand et al (2022). There is the morphological definition, a tense-aspectual construction with an auxiliary and a past participle; and there is the semantic-pragmatic definition, a tense-aspectual construction that shares part of the same set of interpretations, inferences, and restrictions as the English present perfect.…”

“…There have been a number of recent corpus studies, such as Grønn and Von Stechow (2017) and the Translation Mining Project (de Swart 2016; van der Klis et al 2020Klis et al , 2022, with the aim of comparing the different usages and distributions of tense-aspectual constructions for the 'perfect' and the closely related past perfective readings. There is also fieldwork using a storyboard 'Miss Smith's Bad Day' (Matthewson 2014), which is specifically designed for testing the various 'perfect' properties (Bertrand et al 2022;Matthewson et al 2017).…”

Perfect-Perfective Variation across Spanish Dialects: A Parallel-Corpus Study

“…Most theoretical accounts that address the variation in use between forms that instantiate Perfect and Perfective meanings are based predominantly on English data (e.g., McCoard 1978;McCawley 1981;Michaelis 1994;Portner 2003; Nishiyama and Koening 2010), although some recent work has started to consider other European languages, such as German, French, and Dutch (e.g., Löbner 2002;Vet 1992;Schaden 2009;Le Bruyn et al 2019), or even a crosslinguistic perspective (e.g., de Swart 2007;van der Klis et al 2021;Bertrand et al 2022). The main goal of this body of research has been to arrive at a concrete semantics for the Perfect, in order to account for the distribution of (PRESENT) PERFECT 1 of our study: the use of parallel corpora and the application of multidimensional scaling to visualize crossdialectal variation patterns.…”