Present Perfect Research Articles

English Present Perfect and Russian Perfective/Imperfective

English Present Perfect and Russian Perfective/Imperfective

Otra mirada a los procesos de gramaticalización del Presente Perfecto en español: Perú y Argentina

Abstract In this paper we analyze the Preterit (e.g. Estudié toda la noche) and the Present Perfect (PP) (e.g. He estudiado toda la noche) in the Lima variety of Peruvian Spanish (PER) and in Argentinian River Plate Spanish (ARG). PER and ARG have been described as “pretérito-favoring”. We revisit this proposal and show that - although the Preterit is widespread in both these dialects - the use of the PP and the tendency for the Preterit to appear in PP contexts is crucially dissimilar. Based on a thorough analysis of a corpus of oral data (125,352 words), we argue that the different patterns of development in PER and ARG are best explained by the disparate PP usage in continuative and same day/ recent past contexts. We contend that conflating PER and ARG under the umbrella term “Latin American Spanish” does not account for observed usage in oral interaction.

A Case of Grammaticalization in the Use of the Perfect for the Preterite in Bilbao Spanish

Abstract Research into the use of the Present Perfect in various Romance languages often finds that the Present Perfect is taking over functions previously accomplished through the Preterite. This is also the case in Peninsular Spanish. A key constraint on the alternation of the Present Perfect and the Preterite involves the time-frame distinction of “today” versus “before-today”. Among the various dialects of Spanish spoken in Spain,the regional dialect of Bilbao has been identified as having the highest percentage of “today” Present Perfects. Nonetheless, no community-based study of this dialect has been carried out. This study reports the results of a variationist study of the increasing use of the Present Perfect instead of Preterite in the city of Bilbao, Spain, based on 49 sociolinguistic interviews. Twenty factor groups involving linguistic constraints were analyzed. The findings support the findings of previous research except for the case of telicity, polarity and clause type that were not found to be significant in previous research. In addition, the findings provide new evidence of the significance of the following factors in a multi-variate analysis of the alternation of the Present Perfect and the Preterite: mood, the following verb’s mood, the following verb’s tense and narratives.

What is a perfect state?

Although many previous studies have tried to explain the English perfect’s various readings, none of them have been entirely successful. In this article, we argue that the perfect is pragmatically, rather than semantically, ambiguous. The meaning of the perfect introduces a base eventuality and a perfect state whose category is underspecified semantically. Neo-Gricean reasoning leads hearers to appropriately fill in the value of that variable. We present the results of a corpus study of over 600 present perfect examples. The results of this study suggest that (i) most English present perfects receive entailed resultative or continuative readings, (ii) the English perfect need not elaborate on a preexisting topic, and (iii) the English perfect plays a role in establishing discourse coherence by helping hearers establish discourse relations between discourse segments.

The perfect crime? Illicit uses of the present perfect in Australian police media releases

This paper examines extensions in present perfect (PP) usage in a corpus of police media reports published on the web in Australia, following previous work on extensions in the uses of the PP in oral narratives ( Engel and Ritz, 2000; Ritz, 2007; Ritz and Engel, 2008). The following were examined: proportion of tenses in the corpus, lexical aspect of VPs, co-occurrences of the PP with temporal adverbials, and discourse characteristics. The latter were the main focus of the paper, and patterns in PP usage in relation to rhetorical and information structures were examined in detail. The results show that PP clauses are almost as frequent as simple past clauses; that the PP appears frequently in sequences expressing temporal progression, and that it is often combined with a range of adverbials, including past dates and times. It is also argued that police usage of the PP can be seen to give rise to mirative effects, with consequences at the level of discourse usage. In particular, the PP is favoured for introduction of new/unexpected discourse information, while the SP is used in-between clauses in the PP to continue a sub-segment. I use and extend Caudal and Roussarie's (2006) viewpoint analysis of perfects that have acquired perfective past meanings as well as Vikner's (1985) three two-place relations system for the representation of tenses, and propose that the non-standard PP in Australian English can be represented as having a result stage filling a temporal interval between a past reference time and a present one, the extended-now. I suggest that such an interval is exploited to give rise to various meanings and discourse effects.

The Present Perfect and Preterite in British and American English

The objective of our article is to present the selected results of the research which was conducted for the purpose of our master’s thesis. We focused on the transfer of the functions of the present perfect into the domain of the preterite in informal British and American English. We put together a British and an American corpus and analysed the differences and similarities between British and American English in this transfer. We examined some factors that may influence this transfer either in American or British English, or in both varieties. The major factors will be presented in this article. The results show that the differences between both varieties mostly occur in the frequency of this transfer. Moreover, in American English there are more significant factors than in British English. Nevertheless, we can observe that the general tendency is the same in both varieties. This fact may indicate that this phenomenon, which was first noticed in informal American English, is spreading to informal British English.

The role of explicit instruction in the acquisition of the present perfect

This paper aims at analyzing the role of explicit instruction in the learning of the Present Perfect by Brazilian university students in a formal setting. Participants were divided into two groups and tested twice in comprehension and production tasks during a three-week interval. In the second week, the experimental group was exposed to explicit instruction on use and form of the target topic. Results indicate that the explicit instruction group showed overall improvement, providing support to the claim that explicit instruction is beneficial, or at least it is not prejudicial, to foreign language learning.

Present perfects compete

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.

Defaults and indeterminacy in temporal grammaticalization: The ‘perfect’ road to perfective

AbstractAdopting a grammaticalization path perspective on the envelope of variation, that is, the range of grammatical functions along the cross-linguistic perfect-to-perfective path, and employing the variationist comparative method, we compare use of the Present Perfect and Preterit in Mexican and Peninsular Spanish to identify the default past perfective form in each dialect. The linguistic conditioning of the variability provides evidence that the Present Perfect is becoming the default exponent of past perfective in Peninsular Spanish; in empirical terms, the default expression is the one appearing more frequently (combined effect of corrected mean and factor weight) in the most frequent and, crucially, the least specified contexts. The quantitative analysis of natural speech production—rather than elicited—data also suggests a different trajectory for perfect-to-perfective grammaticalization than the commonly assumed route via remoteness distinctions: the Present Perfect's shift from hodiernal to general perfective advances in temporally indeterminate past contexts.

Letter Perfect

This paper uses a multivariate analysis of 19th-century letters by semi-literate African American settlers in Liberia to investigate the frequency and distribution of the present perfect (PP) in earlier African American English (AAE). Despite descriptions elsewhere of the PP as marginal to AAE, it occurs here with great frequency, a finding attributed to the sensitivity of the form to genre differences. The linguistic factors conditioning choice between the PP and the preterite match those described for other varieties of English of that time period. This suggests that an English-like PP was part of the core grammar of the writers of these letters.

“Vivid narrative use” and the meaning of the present perfect in spoken Australian English

This article examines the use of the present perfect (PP) in Australian English using a corpus of stories told during radio chat-show programs and news reports. We find that the PP is used (i) as a narrative tense in spoken texts both with and without narrative present (NarPres); (ii) in sequences of clauses expressing temporal progression; and (iii) with some definite temporal adverbials denoting past time. Such uses are either unusual or unacceptable in other English varieties. A systematic comparison of contexts where NarPres and narrative PP are used in oral narratives reveals that the PP replaces the NarPres predominantly with verbs denoting events. Usage in news reports, where the narrative interpretation is not possible, suggests that a temporal ambiguity exists in the current interpretation of PP sentences. Analysis of lexical aspect shows that the majority of verbs used in the narrative PP are both durative and contain a process part, a fact that helps explain the sense of vividness achieved. At the discourse level, use of the PP enables the speaker to present situations as tightly connected. Such extensions in usage show a possible path for change for a category that is known to be historically unstable in its meaning.

Universal and existencial perfects in Brazilian Portuguese

O presente trabalho trata do pretérito perfeito composto (PPC) ea possibilidade de leituras universais e existenciais. Váriosestudos recentes sobre o “Present Perfect” (“Presente Perfeito”)em línguas mais estudadas (e.g. Inglês, Alemão, Grego, Turco,etc.) descrevem as ambiguidades entre os dois tipos de leiturasque frequentemente são definidos em termos da abordagem“Extended Now” (“Presente Estendido”) (RATHERT, 2003;IATRIDOU et al., 2003; MCCOARD, 1978). A caracterização doPresent Perfect nesta abordagem sofre de alguns problemasmesmo quando se trata de fenômenos nas línguas maisestudadas e também é sujeita a outros novos problemas naanálise do PPC. Dado que análises anteriores têm tratado oPresent Perfect somente em contextos com advérbios durativos,a natureza dos rótulos de ‘universal’ e ‘existencial’ ainda nãofoi testada com advérbios de frequência, por exemplo. Alémdisso, as poucas referências feitas em relação ao PPC têmdeclarado que este apresenta somente a leitura universal(SQUARTINI; BERTINETTO, 2000). É sabido, no entanto, queo PPC apresenta dois tipos de leituras, durativo (e.g. ‘A Mariatem sido feliz’) e iterativo (e.g. ‘A Maria tem visitado os pais’).Estas limitações de abordagens do tipo Extended Now vão serdiscutidas e modificações vão ser propostas para poderacomodar a leitura distinta de iteratividade em Português tantoquanto as leituras mais comuns de repetição encontradas emoutras línguas.

Acquiring perfectivity and telicity in Dutch, Italian and Polish

This paper presents a crosslinguistic study into the acquisition of form-to-meaning correspondences in the domain of aspect. How may form affect the acquisition process and how may meaning do so? The results from aspectual comprehension experiments with Dutch, Italian and Polish L1 learners reveal that both form and meaning properties affect the acquisition path and lead to developmentally different patterns across languages. The semantics of perfective aspect is acquired earlier than imperfective aspect. Moreover, there is a surprising discrepancy in the understanding of perfective aspect. Whereas Dutch and Polish children have acquired the completion entailment of their Present Perfect and perfective aspect respectively by the age of 3, Italian 3-year-olds perform at chance with their Present Perfect. These results do not support the hypothesis of Uniformity of Aspect Acquisition, which claims that certain aspectual notions (in particular, perfective aspect) are acquired around the same age independent of the language-specific encoding. Instead I put forward an acquisition theory of form-to-meaning correspondences that is sensitive both to form – Morphological Salience, namely, the idea that the semantics of morphologically salient paradigms is acquired early – and to meaning – Semantic Complexity, namely, the idea that the semantics of simple aspectual operations is acquired early.

A cross-linguistic discourse analysis of the Perfect

Since Reichenbach (1947), the Present Perfect has been discussed in relation to the Simple Past. The Reichenbachian characterization E-R,S has led to the view that the English Present Perfect, with its restrictions on modification by time adverbials and its resistance to narrative structure is the prototypical perfect. If the Pluperfect is different, or if counterparts of the Present Perfect in other languages behave differently, that is because they are less prototypical perfects. In this paper, we argue that the most important cross-linguistic differences do not require a different sentential semantics, but should rather be explained in terms of different discourse level properties. We investigate Perfect constructions in four languages: English, French, Dutch and German. We argue that all four are Reichenbachian Perfects, and have very similar aspectual properties. Moreover, they introduce the same discourse configuration of Elaboration. However, they differ in the additional constraints imposed upon the possible relations between the event time E and other times or events in the sentence or the surrounding discourse. These differences imply that we can use a Present Perfect construction to tell a story in French and German, but not in English or Dutch.

THE USE OF PRESENT PERFECT IN THE EXPRESSION OF PAST TEMPORALITY IN L2 SPANISH AND CATALAN BY CHILDREN OF MOROCCAN ORIGIN

This study examines the acquisition of Catalan and Spanish past-tense verbs (Preterite, Present Perfect, and Imperfect) by children of Moroccan origin in three schools in the Barcelona metropo1itan area. It presents data that allow us to study which of the three tenses poses the most problems for the second language (L2) speakers as compared to the native speakers in a control group. The data were obtained using elicited story-retell tasks and oral narratives. The results show that in both languages acquiring the accurate functional use of verbs is more difficult than making the right lexical or morphological choices. The greatest functional difficulty lies in the acquisition of the Preterite vis-à-vis the Present Perfect. These results provide additional evidence that form precedes function. However, they challenge an established position on the acquisition of tense and aspect in Romance languages, which holds that the most difficult functional feature to acquire for L2 learners of these languages is the difference between perfective and imperfective tenses.

How Reliable are the Results? Comparing Corpus-Based Studies of the Present Perfect

Abstract The number of linguistic analyses conducted on the basis of authentic language corpora has steadily grown during the last decades. The aim of this paper is to investigate the reliability of individual corpus-based studies by comparing them to studies covering similar or identical grounds. As the subject of investigation the present perfect has been chosen. Ten major corpus-based studies of the present perfect will be surveyed focussing on three main aspects: the frequency of present perfect verb phrases, the temporal specification of utterances in the present perfect and the functions assigned to present perfect constructions.

Indefinite and Continuative Interpretations of the English Present Perfect

The objective of our paper is to demonstrate that the English present perfect is not by inherent meaning either indefinite or continuative. Notions like indefinite and continuative are contextdependent interpretations of whole constructions and their broader context. However, continuative interpretation can also be triggered by certain adverbials, negative constructions and verbs in the progressive form. But, even these factors do not always guarantee continuative interpretations. Construction, continuative meaning can be cancelled by the context in a broader sense, this fact being a proof that this meaning is merely an implicature. We will demonstrate how different factors interact and trigger either indefinite or continuative interpretations which are not inherent in the present perfect itself. Our paper will attempt to provide sufficient evidence that there is no indefinite/continuative distinction in the English present perfect, the inherent meaning or function of the present perfect is merely to locate the situation somewhere within a period that starts before the time of utterance and leads up to it.

Auxiliary Selection in the Present Perfect by L2 Students of German

Previous research in the field of auxiliary verb selection in the present perfect tense has focused primarily on the Romance languages (cf. Burzio, Lois, Cortes, Centineo, Posner), Dutch (cf. Lieber and Baayen, Hoekstra and Mulder, Shannon), German (Shannon, Klein) and older Germanic languages (Shannon). These studies describe the syntax and semantics of auxiliary selection for L1 speakers within a range of theoretical frameworks. With respect to L2 speakers, there are only two studies that address the issue of auxiliary selection. Sorace investigates the acquisition of choosing the correct auxiliary in L2 learners of Italian. This study assumes, as Sorace does, that auxiliary selection is a gradient phenomenon and investigates the factors that affect auxiliary selection for L2 speakers of German as well as their decision-making strategies. Auxiliary selection in German is sensitive to the degree of transitivity of a clause (cf. Shannon, Eisenberg; Zifonun, Hoffmann and Strecker, Klein). The parameters of transitivity consist of two or more participants, aspect, punctuality, volitionality, affirmation, mode, agency, affectedness of the object and the individuation of the object (Hopper and Thompson, Rice, Shannon). A common example of this is fahren [drive], which takes its auxiliary depending on presence of a direct object or other parameters of transitivity. This paper will address auxiliary selection in four groups of L2 students of German.

Tense, aspect and syntax: a review of Giorgi and Pianesi (1997)

This review is devoted to the bulk of Giorgi and Pianesi's (1997) proposal for the (morpho-) syntax and semantics of tense and aspect, presented in chapters 1-4 of their book. The authors investigate the cross-linguistic variation in the semantics of various tense forms (Present, Imperfect, Present Perfect) and claim that it can be directly linked to their morphosyntactic properties, expressed in terms of an explicit theory of functional features and projections. In our critical discussion we contend that (a) the treatment of aspect is deficient (in particular, we criticize the unified analysis of the different usages of the Italian Present Perfect) ; (b) the treatment of actionality -that is, Aktionsart - phenomena is occasionally misconceived; (c) the syntactic treatment of the P-definiteness constraint (Klein 1992) presents some technical problems. On these grounds, we put forward two more general remarks. The first one concerns the assumption that there is a strict correspondence between the morphological exponence of specific inflectional features and tense-aspect semantics. We believe instead that the three levels of semantics, syntax, and morphology must be assumed to be partially independent, although related in a nonarbitrary way. Second, we suggest that G&P have failed to take into account the discourse function of tenses. Although a formal syntactic analysis of tense and aspect is obviously relevant, tense and aspect are intrinsically interface phenomena, where the syntactic configurations yielded by the computational system crucially interact with the independent constraints of other external systems.

Evenki Shamanistic Practices in Soviet Present and Ethnographic Present Perfect

In this article, I explore cultural effects of Soviet religious policies in aboriginal Siberia by looking at the transformation of ritual identities and practices in a group of Evenki hunters and herders between the 1920s and the 1990s. I focus on meanings of buhadyl ("spirits") which Evenki associate with old things and dead people. I read meanings and ritual frameworks of dealing with the buhadyl as sites for re‐imagining Evenki identities and categories of belonging in the context of Soviet society and Soviet ethnographic gaze. In this article, I use results of my own field research in Central Siberia, as well as newly available Soviet archival materials.