Observations about the form and meaning of the Perfect

Abstract

Για τον Κεν, µε αγαπη και ευγνωµοσυνη áa äeÌ, Ò ÎÓ·Ó‚ Ë ·Î ‡"Ó‰ ‡ÌÓÒÚ GoalThe goal of this paper is to establish how certain aspects of the meaning of the perfect are composed from the elements present in its morphosyntactic representation. Not all languages have a present perfect that is structurally and interpretationally distinct from a simple past. We will only be looking at languages that make the distinction.1 In languages that have a perfect, there is variation with respect to the range of meanings associated with it. There are certain meaning components that are always found with a perfect and there are others that vary depending, as we will show, on several factors. Background Common characterizationsThere are a number of intriguing issues surrounding the perfect that have drawn considerable attention in the literature, among the most commonly discussed ones being the fact that the perfect shares properties with both temporal and aspectual forms, and that certain adverbials that one would expect to be possible with the perfect are actually disallowed. In this section, we will briefly present the central points concerning these common characterizations.Similarly to the tenses, the perfect temporally locates an eventuality relative to some reference point. Thus, the perfect is often described as expressing anteriority. Consider, for example, sentence (1):(1) Petros has visited Thailand.

Auxiliary selection and counterfactuality in the history of English and Germanic

“…Now, since the perfect is periphrastic, we can ask which morpho-syntactic portion of it is actually responsible for this anteriority, the auxiliary or the past participle. Iatridou et al (2003) have argued that in Modern English it is the auxiliary, since the participle has no such past meaning when it occurs independently, e.g. in the passive.…”

Vida E Morte Nos Caminhos Dos Gerais

“…For , the tenses are introduced by temporal operators for past, present and future. Assuming an Extended Now (XN) theory, there is a perfect operator that introduces an interval whose left boundary is unspecified and whose right boundary is fixed by the reference time, which in the case of the PRESENT PERFECT, coincides with speech time (McCoard 1978;Iatridou et al 2003). The eventuality is located somewhere within this interval.…”

“…Adverbial modification is important in understanding how possible readings are made more explicit or even shifted to other readings. Section 1 will review the two main lines of research regarding the PRESENT PERFECT, that of Extended Now (McCoard 1978;Iatridou et al 2003) and that of Anteriority or Indefinite Past (Klein 1992(Klein , 1994). approach to the PRESENT PERFECT will be taken as representative of Extended Now (XN) theories since they are more widely adopted in the literature on the PRESENT PERFECT.…”

Topics in Bulgarian morphology and syntax: a minimalist perspective

“…As for interpretation, I refer the reader to Iatridou et al (2001) and Pancheva (in press) for sophisticated proposals on the formal semantics of perfects, paying particular attention to Balkan languages.…”