Abstract
The article covers some issues that concern the syntax and semantics of the present perfect construction in English and other languages. It states that all Present Perfects may be associated with what is considered the canonical construal in which an assertion is located at the present time but reports the existence of a past situation. However, some Present Perfects may, in addition, have a simple past aorist meaning. The author focuses on pluractional and evidential construals of the Present Perfect in some languages, argue that the Passé Composé construal and the Aorist construal of the perfect construction belong to two different modes of discourse, discours and récit, underlines their variability associated with a complex syntactic structure (an auxiliary verb and a verbal participle for Present Perfect, while the Aorist construal is associated with a simple verbal structure). According to the author, the Perfect has both syntactic and analytical ways of realization, thus the analytical syntactic structure of the Perfect is in English, French and German, with both a tensed auxiliary verb and a past participle, whereas it is synthetic in Latin, Russian and Arabic as is presented in the past participle alone; in languages with overt aspectual marking, aspect may vary on either the auxiliary, if it exists, or on the participle.
Highlights
The perfect structure, in particular the present perfect structure, has been the object of much study for English and other languages
The present perfect would assert, in its temporal PC construal, that the core eventuality does not hold at the Utterance Time, and in its modal Perfect of Evidentiality (PE) construal, that while the speaker has no direct evidence that the eventuality holds, she does have indirect evidence because traces of the past eventuality are visible at the UT
While evidentiality is backward looking, focusing on what evidence suggests is already present in the discourse world, modality is forward looking: it focuses on situations which, albeit desirable and possible or even necessary, are missing from the discourse world. This particular form of intentionality, which starts from what is known about the discourse world and looks forward toward a possible or necessary addition to that world is exclusive to human beings 7. Taking into account both Izvorski’s [1997] description of the dual role of the perfect in Bulgarian and early work on the link between existential and possessive sentences by Lyons [1968] and others, I claim that the present perfect expresses direct evidentiality and that this construal is based on the existential content of its auxiliary verb
Summary
The perfect structure, in particular the present perfect structure, has been the object of much study for English and other languages (cf.: [Kiparsky, 2002; Klein, 1992; McCawley, 1981; McCoard, 1978; Michaelis, 1994; Mittwoch, 1988; Alexiadou, Rathert, Stechow, 2012; Portner, 2003; et al.]). Questions remain concerning every aspect of this structure.
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