Observations on the Present Perfect in English

This study examines grammatical and discourse-pragmatric reflexes of the existential and resultative readings of the English present perfect. I present both negative and positive arguments in favor of the claim that the present perfect is ambiguous (rather than vague) with respect to these readings. In particular, I argue that the resultative present-perfect represents a formal idiom: a morphosyntactic form characterized by idiosyncratic constraints on grammar, meaning and use. Certain constraints on the resultative present-perfecti, in particular that which prevents it from denoting a pragmatically presupposed event proposition, can be MOTIVATED with respect to discourse-pragmatic opposition involving the preterite. However, such constraints cannot be PREDICTED from functional oppositions or any general semantic principles. Finally, I suggest that mastery of aspectual grammar crucially entails knowledge of such idiomatic form-meaning pairings.

LEARN Journal, 2019

The present study adopts a corpus-driven perspective to an analysis of the 'current relevance' meaning, a central meaning of the present perfect, in general and textbook corpora. The term 'current relevance' refers to a meaning of the present perfect, in which a past action or event is shown to be connected with the present time in some ways. The relevance to the present, however, is in many cases implicit (Downing & Locke, 2006). This might pose a problem to EFL learners as they may fail to see the link between actions in the past and in the present time and hence use other tenses in English, e.g. the past simple tense or the present simple tense, instead of the present perfect. Adopting a corpus-linguistic perspective, which highlights the pattern-meaning relationship, the present study examines two English general corpora, BE2006 and AME2006, to explore if the 'current relevance' meaning of the present perfect can be realized on textual surface. The analysis suggests that the meaning under study can be expressed textually in four patterns: (1) 'completion', (2) 'cause-effect', (3) 'purpose', and (4) 'sequences of action'. These formal categories are then explored in an investigation of English language textbook samples in Thailand. The comparison between patterns found in the general and textbook corpora reveals that the four textual patterns are shared by both corpora but with different ratios. That is, the pattern 'completion' is found to occur more frequently in the sampled textbooks while the patterns 'purpose' and 'cause-effect' show a significantly lower frequency than that in the general corpora. The study offers a new light on the description of the present perfect's central meaning 'current relevance' in terms of the pattern-meaning relationship and also provides pedagogical implications for development of textbooks and teaching materials.

tede.pucrs.br

This paper investigates the frequency of the present perfect (PP) in 20 national varieties of English, many of which have so far rarely been studied from a corpus-linguistic point of view, with data from the 1.9 billion word GloWbE corpus. PP frequency was measured (1) per million words and (2) as a percentage of all past references. Linear regression models were used to determine which of the factors identified in previous research can account for differences in PP frequency across varieties. The results revealed that a major factor is geographic proximity: Varieties spoken in the same region tend to be similar in PP frequency. Other factors such as degree of formality or the classification in Kachru’s Circles Model and Schneider’s Dynamic Model of Postcolonial English appear to have little or no influence on the frequency of the PP. The paper also discusses other factors that might be influential, such as substrate influence, the heterogeneous superstrate, national identities, and the degree of cultural contact between varieties. Finally, the discussion explores implications for teaching English as a local and as an international language, arguing that norms of English language teaching should depend on the learners’ communicative needs.

ENGLISH LINGUISTICS, 2002

Few previous studies have systematically examined the fact that the English present perfect and the German Perfekt behave differently with respect to co-occurrence with adverbials referring to a definite time position (DTP adverbials) in the past such as yesterday/gestern and ten years ago/vor 10 Jahren. This paper aims to explain this fact systematically on the basis of the revised P(osition)-Definiteness Constraint, which is originally proposed to account for the incompatibility of the English present perfect and the DTP adverbials. It is demonstrated that the reason why the German Perfekt, unlike its English morphological counterpart, can occur with the DTP adverbials is due to the interaction between the revised P-Definiteness Constraint and certain characteristics of the German Perfekt. It is also shown that the proposed account provides an explanatory basis for the following two issues: (i) why the German Perfekt can go with DTP adverbials referring to future time, whereas the English present perfect cannot, and (ii) why the German Perfekt has a wider semantic range than the English present perfect.* Keywords: English present perfect, German Perfekt, adverbials referring to a definite time position (DTP adverbials), revised P-Definiteness Constraint, figure/ground able comments and suggestions, and Wolfgang Klein for answering my questions about his tense theory. All remaining inadequacies are my own.

Linguistics and Philosophy, 2009

This paper proposes a new look at the so-called 'present-perfect puzzle'. I suggest that it is in fact part of a bigger problem, which also involves simple past tenses. I argue that present perfects compete with simple past tenses, and that the distribution of these tenses shows signs of the impact of this competition. The outcome of the competition is argued to be heavily dependent on which of the two tense-forms is the default. A pragmatic theory is proposed which accounts for the reduced distribution of the present perfect in languages like English and (American) Spanish, and the reduced distribution of the simple past tense in languages like French and German.

2013

The paper discusses some issues and misunderstandings in the interpretation of what Huddleston and Pullum (2002) call ‘the resultative perfect’. It is shown, in particular, how and when Leech (1971) was right about the meaning of the English present perfect, when he thought he wasn’t (and how he wasn’t when he thought he was).

International Academy Of Sciences, Engineering and Technology, 2019

The present paper aims to analyze differences in the use of the present perfect (henceforth PP) and the simple past (henceforth SP) between British English (BrE) and American English (AmE). Both PP and SP are used to refer to an event or state in the past. In addition, both can be used to refer to a state of affairs that existed for a period of time. The primary difference in meaning between PP and SP is that while the former describes a situation that continues to exist up to the present time, the latter describes a situation that no longer exists or an event that took place at a particular time in the past. This meaning difference is often made explicit by temporal adverbs accompanying the main verb (Biber et al., 1999, 467).in an attempt to examine the differences in the use of PP and SP between BrE and AmE, the present study employs six temporal adverbs: already, just, never, ever, yet, and before. These adverbs have been used because some of these are the most frequent temporal adverbs in English (Biber et al., 1999, 795-99) and these adverbs have been explored in many of the previous studies (e.g., Quirk et al., 1985; Easiness 1997; Hundt and Smith 2009;Yao and Collins 2012) in relation to their use in PP and SP.

Australian Journal of Linguistics

paper describes and discusses the use of the present perfect in Australian English which, when compared to uses in other varieties of English, is found in a broader range of contexts. Examination of data collected mainly from radio news programs and chat shows reveals that the present perfect in Australian English is used: (1) in combination with past temporal adverbials; (2) in sequences indicating narrative progression; (3) in alternation with the simple past and the present tense to express stylistic contrast. All these uses are common in our sample, which seems to indicate that the category is undergoing an extension of its meaning.

This thesis is about the German and English Present Perfect in relation to two classes of adverbs. The first class consists of temporal adverbs expressing duration (bis 'until', seit 'since', lang 'for') and has often been argued to be interrelated to the Present Perfect, but as I argue, it is not. The second class contains Extended-Now-adverbs like schon immer 'ever since', i.e. adverbs denoting a time span that starts in the past and reaches up until speech time. This class has never been related to the Perfect before. However, I show that there is a very intimate interrelation. Extended-Now-adverbs make the traditional Reichenbachian Perfect-semantics untenable and suggest strongly that the correct Perfect-semantics is the Extended-Nowtheory. I adopt this theory of the Perfect for both German and English. One important aspect of this thesis is my web-based data collection. My data show that a lot of claims made in the literature do not hold, which has important consequences for linguistic theory. I assume the following meaning rules for the German and English Perfect, respectively:

2013

A vast majority of known languages have mechanisms which enable the speaker to express time (Comrie, 1985). Among these languages most of them also express time with a verb, and more specifically, with various verbal tenses (Smith, 1991). The verbal tense, a grammatical category which differs significantly from one language to another may also be considered a grammaticalization of time; in other words, chronological time is expressed with,

Studies in Language 24, 345-77., 2000

Based on a comparison of Old English habban + Past Participle and Spanish tener + Past Participle this paper discusses specific arguemnatative routines / discourse strategies for which speakers use resultatives. On the basis of this analysis, the paper explains the shift from non-temporal to temporal meaning.

Linguistic interference in the acquisition of tenses has remained a fertile area for extensive studies on the teaching of English to speakers of other languages. Congruent with previous studies, this study aims to find out whether errors in the learning of a grammatical category is more ascribable to negative transfer resulting from learners' first language or the rules governing its use in the target language. Employing a grammaticality judgment test in the form of an elicitation procedure, the researcher focuses on second language learners' acquisition of the present perfect continuous in an attempt to investigate the extent to which interference may occur as a result of learners' confusion with temporal and aspectual values that collectively form part of the learners' mother tongue and second language. Using the data elicited, the researcher has found that linguistic interference should not be construed as merely negative transfer from the learner's first language because temporal and aspectual values associated with verb forms in the target language itself may also be an essential component of interference. Based on the findings, the researcher has recommended a three-pronged interactive approach to the teaching of the present perfect continuous, related verbal categories, and temporal/frequency adverbials.

American Research Journal of English and Literature, 2020

This paper explores a pragmatic approach in the analysis of the English present and past tenses. The paper contends that the English present and past are best interpreted by examining not only the propositions expressed within these tenses, but also the in-built meanings expressed by the pragmatics of the context, world knowledge and word-class combinations that underpin them. Hinging on the Relevance Theory of Communication (cf. Sperber and Wilson cited in Xinyue Yao [1], this paper concludes that the value of a proposition is essentially speaker-hearer driven. From the end of the speaker, processing communication entails knowing the topic-relevance of a speaker's utterance (message). On the whole, the complexity of the English present and past as well as incompetence in their normative properties culminate into non-pragmatic use of them in discourse.