perfect tense and aspect

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c hapter 31

PERFECT TENSE AND ASPECT Marie-Eve Ritz

1. Introduction In English and a number of other European languages, the perfect is a complex morpho-syntactic construction made of an auxiliary (“have,” “be”) followed by a past participle, as in “Jamie has eaten all the chocolate biscuits.” The auxiliary appears in the past, present and future tenses, thus creating past, present and future perfects. Typologically, this analytic perfect is predominantly (if not exclusively) found in the languages of Europe (Dahl, 2000), and we find perfect meaning expressed formally by other means in a number of the world’s languages, although many languages don’t have a perfect at all. Much scholarly work on perfects has concentrated on the analytic type, with even more attention paid to the present form of this tense as it is typically unstable and often develops into a past perfective tense. In this respect, standard English is an exception, as its present perfect (PP) has escaped this general trend. The English perfect has also challenged theories attempting to capture a core meaning for all its uses, as its present tense form is subject to a number of constraints in usage that do not apply to its past and future counterparts, a problem often referred to as “the present perfect puzzle” (Klein, 1992). More generally, and as discussed in detail in Binnick (1991), the perfect has been a problematic category for scholars across time due to the multiplicity of its meanings/uses within a given language and to the variation in meanings/uses of what has been labeled “perfect” across languages. In an attempt to provide a clearer understanding of this complex semantic category, the present chapter will start by considering typological and historical facts that need to be taken into consideration

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when discussing theories of the perfect. In section 3, we investigate in more detail theories of the perfect focusing on semantic characteristics, bearing in mind that most of the discussions have revolved around perfects in European languages (Germanic and Romance). In section 4, we discuss accounts of how pragmatic factors and discourse relations affect the use of the perfect, and in section 5, we conclude by examining the place of a perfect in a tense/aspect system more generally, considering how it relates to categories such as the resultative and the simple past, and also to the habitual and the prospective.

2. The Perfect in a Typological and Diachronic Perspective

2.1. Typological and Diachronic Variation: Overview How do we recognize a perfect? A form labeled “perfect” in one language may have a formal equivalent in a related language, yet the two may cover a range of different meanings and uses. In order to define what the perfect is, we need to consider how a semantic category “perfect” can be characterized, and a good starting point is to examine typological research on forms encoding such meaning(s) and functions. It is also useful to compare the perfect with other categories such as the resultative and the simple past because they are intimately related to perfects both diachronically and synchronically. In this section we thus begin by examining how typological research on the perfect has been conducted and what its major findings are. Cross-linguistic investigations of the perfect have been relatively rare, and grammarians traditionally described perfects within language-specific tense/ aspect systems. Important recent contributions to the field include work by Bybee, Perkins, and Pagliuca (1994) and the study conducted by the EUROTYP Tense and Aspect Theme Group (Dahl, 2000). This latter project started from the premise that a cross-linguistic category perfect could be identified empirically, without relying on a previously determined semantic characterization. Data were collected in more than thirty languages in Europe using a questionnaire providing linguistic contexts designed to elicit perfects and other related categories. Generally, results show that the perfect is frequent but also unstable, as it tends to evolve into something else, most commonly a general past tense (Lindstedt, 2000, p. 366). The contexts provided to informants in the various languages surveyed in the EUROTYP project were designed in part to elicit the various meanings of the perfect, as described in McCawley (1971, 1981) and Comrie (1976), namely:


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• The universal perfect or perfect of “persistent situation,” which denotes a state holding throughout an interval, as exemplified by (1): (1) Matilda has lived in Sydney for two years (and she still lives there).

• The existential or experiential perfect, which presents an event as having occurred at least once in an interval starting in the past and lasting up to the present: (2) Dean has been to Adelaide.

• The perfect of result or stative perfect, which indicates that the result or consequences of a past situation hold at the moment of speech: (3) Dean has arrived (he is here).

• The perfect of recent past or “hot news” perfect: (4) The Reserve Bank has just announced an increase in interest rates.

The central meaning of these different types of perfect has often been described as one of current relevance (CR) (McCoard, 1978), which means that a sentence in the perfect describes a situation that is more relevant to the present than, for instance, a clause in the simple past (SP). While the concept “relevant to the present” is too vague and general to be of real use as such, Dahl and Hedin (2000, p. 391) propose to view CR as a graded concept, with the perfect of result exemplifying its strongest requirement as it denotes “continuance of result.” Indeed, perfects of result only obtain when a telic or “change-of-state” verb is used, as exemplified by (3) above, where the state of Dean being here as a result of having arrived is entailed by the sentence. Dahl (2000, p. 391) proposes that grammaticalisation of the perfect involves in part a relaxation of CR requirements. Lindstedt (2000) contrasts CR with “current result,” a feature of resultative constructions. Resultatives “ . . . express a state implying a previous event (action or process) it has resulted from.” (Nedjalkov, 2001, p. 928; see also Bybee et al., 1994, p. 54) and contrast with perfects in that they can combine with adverbs expressing non-limited duration such as still or as before (Dahl, 1985; Nedjalkov & Jaxontov, 1988; Bybee et al., 1994; Lindstedt, 2000). Lindstedt contrasts the following two English examples to illustrate the distinction: (5) She is still gone. (6) *She has still gone. (with still used in a temporal meaning)

Example (5) expresses a temporary state and thus modification by the adverbial is possible. However (6) denotes a different kind of state, if it denotes a state at all (see section 3). Another important difference between the resultative and the perfect is that the meaning of the former always directly depends on the lexical meaning of the verb


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(Nedjalkov, 2001, p. 930), whereas the results or consequences of the latter are not so easy to specify (see section 3 for details, and section 4 for a discussion). Perfects often take their origins in resultative constructions, with a shift of meaning from current result to current relevance (see also Nicolle, this volume, for a discussion of models of diachronic stages). This shift is characterized by an expansion in the types of verbs used, from exclusively telic verbs in resultative constructions, to both telic and atelic verbs in perfect constructions (Bybee et al., 1994; Dahl and Hedin, 2000). According to Lindstedt (2000, p. 368), “A CR perfect is a perfect in its most central, prototypical meaning.” CR perfects then gradually develop to include experiential meaning, and thus acquire a more “tense-like” function (p. 369), where past time reference is indefinite. Lindstedt comments that the path from experiential to indefinite past tense is rare, if documented at all, which is surprising given the “tense-like” function of this type of perfect. On the other hand, CR perfects often develop into (perfective) past tenses, where past time reference is clearly definite and where relations between events can be expressed within a narrative. Thus, there is a negative criterion for identifying perfects as well in that, “When a perfect can be used as a narrative tense . . . it has ceased to be a perfect” (p. 371). French provides one of the clearest example of a perfect that has become a compound past tense (the passé composé, henceforth PC), allowing combinations with definite past adverbials, sequences of clauses expressing temporal progression (and more generally, expressing any temporal order, see de Swart, 2007) as well as allowing talk about objects and individuals no longer in existence. These uses are exemplified respectively in (7)–(9) below. By contrast, canonical perfects yield ungrammatical sentences if used in the contexts described above, as illustrated by the unacceptable translations of (7)–(9) using the PP (at least in standard British and U.S. English): (7) Martin est parti (PC) il y a deux jours /le premier décembre. *Martin has left two days ago /on the first of December. (8) Martin s’est levé (PC) à sept heures. Ensuite, il a déjeûné (PC), puis a pris (PC) le bus pour se rendre à son bureau et est arrivé (PC) à neuf heures. *Martin has got up at seven. After that, he has eaten breakfast, then has taken the bus to go to his office and has arrived at nine. (9) Napoleon a transformé (PC) Paris. *Napoleon has transformed Paris.

While in English the PP is ungrammatical in the contexts exemplified above, the past and future perfect both allow modification of the event with a past temporal adverbial as well as uses in narrative sequences as shown in (10) and (11) respectively: (10) Dean had /will have arrived in Sydney the day before we left/leave for Paris /on the first of December. (11) Dean had /will have got up at seven. After that, he had /will have eaten breakfast, then had /will have taken the bus to go to his office. . . .

The past and future perfect can also express permansive meaning (Binnick, 1991), thus behave like the present perfect in such uses, as shown in (12) where the result of Dean’s leaving is in force at the time denoted by the adverbial:


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(12) At 3 o’clock Dean had /will have (already) left.

Thus, there is an asymmetry between the past and future perfect on the one hand, and the PP on the other, the latter being a typical example of a canonical perfect. The asymmetries described above also contrast the PP with a tenseless perfect, where definite temporal adverbials locating the event denoted by the VP are acceptable as well: (13) Having missed his plane to Sydney on Monday night, Dean had no choice but to find a room in a nearby hotel.

Other facts a theory of the perfect needs to be able to explain include the so-called “lifetime effects” (see also (9) above). Since Charles Darwin died some time ago, we cannot describe any relevant consequences of any visit to Australia on his life, hence the unacceptability of (14). On the other hand, his visit may still have consequences for Australia, and (15) is considered to be acceptable, for example in a context where one is listing illustrious people who have visited the country. (14) *Charles Darwin has visited Australia. (15) Australia has been visited by Charles Darwin.

In summary, a perfect enables a situation to become part of an extended period that includes a reference time (the time of speech if the PP is used, or another time established by the context in the case of past and future perfects), with the said situation being anterior to such time. The “after effects” of the situation are variable, and the situation itself cannot be located temporally using a definite locating adverbial, nor can it be temporally related to other situations. Much scholarly work has concentrated on representing the complex meaning of the perfect in a precise fashion, and we now turn to some of the important proposals made to achieve this end.

3. The Semantics of the Perfect We begin by examining semantic representations of the perfect before turning to characterization of its pragmatics in section 4. Such examination leads us to focus on the question of the temporal and aspectual attributes of the perfect in section 3.1 Section 3.2 examines temporal representations of the perfect in more detail, and section 3.3 focuses on whether there is a “perfect state,” and if so, how it can be characterized.

3.1. Is the Perfect a Tense, an Aspect, or Both? The question of whether the perfect is an aspect has been answered in vastly different ways. Contrast McCoard’s (1978, p. 11) categorical remark: “. . .we shall not refer to the perfect as an aspectual category: in this book, the perfect is not a marker


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of aspect” with Huddleston’s (1988, p. 77) statement that “[p]erfect aspectual meaning involves a situation resulting from the completion of an earlier situation, and perfect as a grammatical category applies to one with this as its characteristic meaning” Comrie (1976, p. 52) acknowledges his uneasiness about the question when he states: “. . . given the traditional terminology in which the perfect is listed as an aspect, it seems most convenient to deal with the perfect in a book on aspect, while bearing in mind continually that it is an aspect in a rather different sense from other aspects treated so far.” However Comrie also points out the similarity between the PP and the prospective, explaining that both involve a state relating to an anterior and posterior situation, respectively. The main difference between the two is that with the prospective, “. . . unlike the perfect, it is possible to specify the time at which the future situation will occur” (p. 64), an observation which Comrie illustrates with example (16): (16) If Winterbottom’s calculations are correct, this planet is going to burn itself out 200,000,000 years from now.

We return to the parallel between PP and prospective in section 5. McCoard’s decision was made on the grounds that neither “completion” nor “result” are meanings that are “intrinsic” to the perfect. By contrast, Huddleston (1988, p. 77) notes that completeness makes the perfect similar to the past tense, but stresses that “with perfect aspect the emphasis is on the current or resultant state, while with past tense it is on the past situation itself.” The decision whether or not to categorize the perfect as an aspect thus depends on both what one considers the semantics of this category to be, and what one’s definition of aspect is. These questions are addressed throughout the present section. With respect to tense, the view is more homogeneous, as perfects appear in the present, past, and future tenses. Their representation thus always involves some temporal specification. We now turn to specific proposals for aspectual and temporal representations of the perfect, after providing a brief overview of the four types of theories that have been proposed to account for the meaning of perfects. Four major theories have been developed in order to give a representation of the PP that could include all the types exemplified by (1)–(4). This involved accounting for the fact that the PP conveys information about both past and present, and each theory attempted to describe the link between past and present on the basis of syntactic, semantic or pragmatic arguments. It is not our goal here to discuss these theories in detail; for more information the reader is referred to McCoard (1978) and Binnick (1991), who classify the various theories into four broad types, namely, the “indefinite past” (ID), the “extended-now” (XN), the “embedded past” (EP), and the “current relevance” (CR) theories. Here, we will simply note the fact that each of these theories focuses on a particular feature of the PP and accounts for it from a syntactic, a semantic, or a pragmatic perspective. The ID theory emphasises the fact that the PP does not combine with definite past adverbials; the theory captures an important constraint governing the use of the PP. However, this constraint does not uniquely characterize the PP as simple past (SP) sentences can also


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contain reference to an indefinite time; furthermore, it is not enough to explain the PP’s major semantic contribution, as definite adverbials can be used with it as long as they refer to a period that goes up to the moment of speech. The XN theory does answer this latter problem and sees the requirement that the PP refer to an interval that extends from the past to the moment of speech as most characteristic of its meaning. The problem here has to do with the reference to an interval, as nonstative VPs in the PP do not last throughout the interval, as exemplified by (17): (17) Since 2008, Matilda has moved house and Dean has changed jobs.

Vlach (1993) has offered a pragmatic solution to this problem by imposing the XN requirement onto adverbials associated with the PP; if no XN adverbial is present in the sentence, he assumes that it is understood. The question is then why does the PP combine with such adverbials? The EP theory is a purely syntactic theory (Binnick 1991, p. 103), which describes the PP as a past in the scope of the present. As such, it does not enable us to account for the variety of uses of the form, but stresses the importance of the present over the past. CR theories also give special importance to the present by stressing that the PP expresses the continuing relevance of a situation that took place prior to the moment of speech (cf. McCawley, 1971, 1981; Comrie, 1976). The notion is of a pragmatic nature, and until recently, remained very general; criticisms include the fact that other tenses also describe situations that have continuing relevance, and thus the principle of relevance fails to establish a systematic contrast between SP and PP (see e.g., McCoard, 1978, p. 32). A number of scholars have argued for representations that make the perfect ambiguous or polysemous: for instance, Sandstrøm (1993) argues for two different analyses depending on whether the VP used in the PP sentence denotes a state or an event. She sees XN theories as better suited to account for sentences whose VP is stative, whereas for her, CR theories fit sentences whose VP is non-stative better. Declerck (1991) considers that PP sentences can have an indefinite or a continuative interpretation: in the former case, the situation denoted by the sentence does not go up to the time of speech, whereas in the latter it includes it. These last two representations make the PP aspectually and temporally ambiguous. Michaelis (1994) closely examines resultative and experiential readings of the English PP and concludes with a verdict of ambiguity, arguing that constraints governing PP uses cannot be predicted from its semantics. She views the resultative perfect as a formal idiom. Kiparsky (2002) also concludes that resultative perfects (a category in which he includes hot-news perfects) are distinct semantically from other types on the basis that the resultative perfect (i) does not trigger sequence of tense like a past tense; (ii) is not acceptable in adverbial wh-questions unless the adverbial relates to the result state, as exemplified in (18) and (19): (18) *Where have you found my watch? (19) Where have you hidden my watch?

In (18), the locative where is used to ask about a place where the watch was prior to being found, while in (19) it is used to ask about its location at present, that is, from


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the time it was hidden. (19) may become acceptable if we add “whenever it was lost/ before,” thus forcing an experiential reading. Recent representations of the perfect have attempted to make either CR or XN accounts more precise. Accounts generally differ in which aspects of the meaning of the PP they attribute to its semantics and which they claim can be explained by pragmatic principles. Within the domain of semantics, much of the question revolves around whether a purely temporal representation of the perfect is adequate, or whether perfect sentences denote a state. We consider these proposals in turn, starting with temporal accounts.

3.2. Temporal Representations of the Perfect Reichenbach (1947) was the first to propose a temporal framework in which perfects could be uniquely characterized as having their event time (E) dissociated from their reference time (R), in contrast with simple tenses. In turn, perfects in different tenses are distinguished by the fact that R is either in the past of speech time (S), co-temporal with S or posterior to it. Since Reichenbach, most representations of the perfect have incorporated at least the spirit of this characterization, with some variations. We focus here on one of these as it will be useful for our discussion: Klein’s (1992) substitution of R with Topic Time (TT). Klein (1992, p. 535) defines TT as “ . . . the time span to which the claim made on a given occasion is constrained.” Like Reichenbach, Klein represents perfects as having their Time of Situation (TSit, corresponding to Reichenbach’s E) dissociated from the TT. In his framework, S is labeled Time of Utterance (TU) and TT is either before, included in, or posterior to TU when a perfect is used in the past, present and future tenses respectively. Since Klein (p. 538) defines aspect as relating TSit to TT, the perfect is also an aspect in his framework. However, what lies after TSit is labeled a “post-phase,” and the perfect is not analyzed as a stative category, so one could argue that Klein’s representation is perhaps closer to temporal ones, to which we turn now. XN theorists, as explained above, take the view that the semantics of the PP is temporal but have problems accounting for the continuative/non-continuative contrast, and thus the PP comes out as ambiguous in this approach. A more recent account defending this view is that of Portner (2003), who attempts to overcome the problem by following Bauer (1970), Dowty (1979), and others in stressing the role played by the lexical aspectual class of the VP in these two readings, as well as by the presence or absence of a for-adverbial. Firstly, Portner remarks that stative VPs behave in the same way in other tenses, as can be seen when they are used in embedded clauses and in larger pieces of discourse. Witness the difference between embedded stative and embedded eventive complements (Portner, 2003, pp. 481–482): (20) John said that Mary was upset. (21) John said that Mary read Middlemarch.


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The main clause in each sentence introduces an eventuality that also establishes a reference time in relation to which the embedded clause can be located. Example (20) can mean either that Mary’s being upset (E) occurred prior to the time when John said that she was (R), or that it coincided with this R. By contrast, (21) can only have one reading, namely that Mary read Middlemarch prior to the R introduced by the main clause. This observation leads Portner to formulate a “Temporal Sequencing Principle” (TSP), which he summarizes as follows (p. 484): For any tenseless clause ϕ, reference time r, and event e, (i) if ϕ is not stative: ‖ ϕ ‖r,e implies that e precedes r; and (ii) if ϕ is stative: ‖ ϕ ‖r,e implies that e either precedes or overlaps r. (in (ii), ‘e’ is taken to be a state) In (i) and (ii), ‖ ϕ ‖r,e means that the clause is interpreted in relation to the reference time r and the eventuality e. Thus any tenseless clause (including embedded clauses, as they are taken to be semantically tenseless) will be interpreted as having a nonstative eventuality precede R and a stative one either precede or overlap R. The same principle generally applies to sequences of sentences connected in discourse. Secondly, Portner points out that a continuative reading only obtains if a foradverbial is present in the sentence, as shown by (22) (which allows a continuative reading) and (23) (which does not): (22) Matilda has lived in Adelaide for ten years. (23) Matilda has lived in Adelaide.

As Dowty (1979, p. 343) had noted, if the for-adverbial is preposed, the sentence requires a continuative reading: (24) For ten years, Matilda has lived in Adelaide.

Portner follows Hitzeman (1997), who offers a syntactic explanation in which she proposes that at Logical Form, adverbials can originate in VP and then move to IP, leaving a trace, which makes it possible for them to lower to the VP level subsequently. Only if the temporal specification represented by the adverbial is inside the VP can it undergo “existential closure” (i.e., get bound by an existential quantifier, cf. Diesing, 1992). Thus, if the adverbial is postposed, two interpretations of the sentence are possible. Alternatively, the adverbial can originate at the level of IP, in which case there is no trace for it to return to. In Hitzeman’s account, this explains why (24) can only have one reading, whereas (22) can have two interpretations. Thus, the temporal ambiguity generated by sentences such as (22) can be dismissed, as it does not have its source in the semantics of the PP. The PP is then semantically characterized, following Reichenbach, as denoting an eventuality that is dissociated from its reference time like other perfects (although if the VP denotes a state, it can overlap with R, according to the observations made above). Other phenomena are explained through pragmatic principles (see section 4).


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We note for the time being that while XN theory in its different manifestations has often been described as accounting well for the incompatibility of the PP with definite past adverbials, it still does not explain why such incompatibility is absent in other languages. We return to this point in section 4.

3.3. The Perfect Aspect: Is There a Perfect State? One important question is whether the perfect denotes a state or not. Those who argue in favor of a stative analysis of the perfect have variously used the terms “result,” “resultant,” “consequent,” or “perfect” state (Moens, 1987; Parsons, 1990; Kamp and Reyle, 1993; Giorgi & Pianesi, 1997; Smith, 1997; de Swart, 1998; Katz, 2003; Nishiyama and Koenig, 2004, 2006). We now examine these accounts in more detail. Representations of the perfect as denoting a state show variability both in terms of how they view the nature of the state in question, and in terms of how the state relates to the eventuality denoted by the VP. For Moens (1987), Moens and Steedman (1988), and Smith (1997), the state denoted by a perfect is the result of the occurrence of an eventuality. Moens (1987) and Moens and Steedman (1988) view the perfect as an aspectual operator represented by a function, taking the perfect of result, or stative perfect, as the most representative or prototypical of their characterization. Perfects of result require a telic VP, and entail that the consequences of the eventuality are in force now. Thus (3) (“Dean has arrived”) entails that Dean is here now, while (25) does not entail that Matilda is still at the Opera House: (25) Matilda has been to the Opera House.

Examples such as (3) thus provide the basis for representation of the perfect in general, which is described as mapping the telic or culmination point into a consequent state. Figure 31.1 below illustrates the authors’ concept of “nucleus,” which captures the different phases an eventuality can have maximally; the portion denoted by the perfect is shown with diagonal lines: What happens if the VP is not a culmination (which corresponds to an achievement in Vendler’s classification) as in (26) below? (26) Dean has worked in the garden.

The perfect operator will coerce the VP into a culmination, subject to the requirement that the sentence make sense in context. Thus, the activity “work in the garden” will be coerced into an achievement, and contextual knowledge will enable a

preparatory process

culmination

consequent state

Figure 31.1. Moens’s (1987) and Moens and Steedman’s (1988) nucleus: Perfect denotes a consequent state


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hearer to re-interpret (26) as meaning, for example, that the task had been planned and needed to be finished before some other activity could take place. The theory is an interesting attempt to provide a unified analysis of the perfect in a dynamic framework. Criticisms have included disputing the central place given to culminations as it is difficult to explain why (27) and (28) are acceptable in the perfect: (27) Dean has lived in Adelaide. (28) The guests have complained about the bad service. (Depraetere, 1996, p. 16)

Reinterpretation of the VP as having “an inherent or intended endpoint” (i.e., a telic point) is not obvious, yet the sentences are fine without the need for a contextual reinterpretation along these lines. It seems that Moens (1987) is talking about a temporal boundary rather than a telic point, but then it is difficult to see what the notion of “consequent state” refers to if no telic point is part of the meaning of the VP. Another criticism concerning the notion of consequent state is that it cannot account for the fact that (29b) does not result from the event of seeing the key, as discussed in Nishiyama and Koenig (2004, p. 106): (29) a. I have seen the key in this room. b. The key is in this room.

Indeed, there is no causal relation between the seeing event and the fact that the keys are in the room, yet (29a) can be used convey the information expressed in (29b). Another proposal representing PP clauses as denoting a state is Kamp and Reyle’s (1993), using Discourse Representation Theory (DRT). This representation involves the introduction of a discourse referent, s, for what they term a “result” state (rather than “consequent” state, as they feel that the latter is possibly misrepresentative). More specifically, this result state is defined as starting immediately after (or abutting) the event denoted by the VP, and extending to and including the moment of speech. Thus, for the sentence Dean has arrived, we obtain the following discourse representation structure (DRS) (30): (30) [n s t x e | t=n, t ⊆ s, Dean(x), e ⊃⊂ s, e: x arrive]

where n stands for the time of speech; t for the “temporal reference point” (which is similar to Reichenbach’s R); here, t is co-temporal with n and is a subinterval of s (the result state denoted by the perfect VP); e ⊃⊂ s symbolises the fact that e (the event denoted by the VP) abuts s. The event e is further specified as involving an argument x (here, Dean) and the predicate ‘arrive’. When the DRS is embedded into a model, it will be true iff there is a state that starts immediately after the event, and goes up to n while also including n. However, there is still a problem with this representation as it does not link e and s: imagine a situation where Dean arrives, and just as he does so, the light goes off; the event of arriving is immediately followed by the room being pitch dark, and this lasts until now. Such a situation would make the DRS above true; yet, this is not what a PP sentence means, and despite the fact that


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the results of the eventuality are quite variable, they still relate to it in some fundamental way. Another proposal views the perfect as denoting a permanent state (Galton, 1984; Parsons, 1990; ter Meulen, 1995). On this view, the end of an event will always entail the state of the event’s having occurred. For instance in Parsons (1990), the perfect denotes a resultant state (R-state) defined as being the state of the underlying event denoted by the VP’s having culminated. In his framework, activities are considered to include culminations, thus there is no need to appeal to coercions. However, states do not culminate, and are said to simply “hold.” Parsons thus gives two definitions for his R-state, which he formulates as follows (31): (31) a. e’s R-state holds at t ≡ e culminates at some time at or before t. b. s’s R-state holds at t ≡ the period of time for which s holds terminates at or before t.

A sentence in the present perfect is represented with the following logical form, using a neo-Davidsonian framework (32): (32) Mary has eaten the apple. ∃e∃x(eat(e) ∧ Agent(e,Mary) ∧ Theme(e,x) ∧ apple(x) ∧ Hold(R-state(e),S)

I.e., there is an event, the event is an eating, the agent is Mary, the theme is the apple, and the event’s result state holds at the time of speech. Such a representation is differentiated from that of a simple past sentence where e culminates before S. Moreover, the incompatibility of the PP with past adverbials is accounted for on the basis of a logical contradiction: the time for which e’s R-state holds cannot be both S and e.g., yesterday, which is in the past of S. Parsons is careful to distinguish between the R-state of a culminated event, and its “target state”: if someone throws a ball onto a roof, he explains, the “target state” of this event is a state where the ball is on the roof. This state will last until the ball is moved from this location. By contrast, the R-state of the same event is the state of someone’s having thrown the ball onto the roof. Thus, it will never cease to hold. Giorgi and Pianesi (1997, p. 92) offer as a counterexample to Parson’s analysis the following scenario: imagine that John wins a race on Thursday, but is subsequently disqualified on Friday because he is found to test positive for drugs. We can then assert the following: (33) On Thursday John had won the race. (34) (As for today) John has not won the race.

Thus it is possible for the R-state of the event to hold on Thursday, but not on Friday, making the permanency of the R-state doubtful, in their opinion. Giorgi and Pianesi (1997) instead view perfects as denoting a consequent state (CS) that is realized by the means of a binary relation, thus making any CS unique and non-permanent: “A consequent state of such an event e [i.e., a culminated event] is any connected event the left temporal boundary of which coincides with the right temporal boundary (culmination) of e” (p. 98).


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Giorgi and Pianesi (1997, pp. 91–92) also comment that Parsons’s explanation of the incompatibility of the PP with past adverbials is very similar to that offered by XN theorists: in both cases, it is due to “conflicting requirements” introduced by two mutually exclusive temporal specifications. However, they point out that in languages such as French, as seen earlier, past adverbials are allowed. Moreover, if a native speaker of English is presented with such a sentence and asked what it would mean, were it acceptable, the meaning they attribute to it is one where the adverbial “fixes the time of the event.” The question of what an adequate representation of a perfect state might be perhaps requires an answer to a more basic one, namely, are perfect clauses indeed stative? Dowty (1979) pointed out that stativity tests typically give unclear results when applied to perfects. For instance, for-adverbials combine well with stative predicates, but do not seem to be felicitous when non-stative VPs are used in the perfect, as shown in (35): (35) *Matilda has finished writing the letter for an hour.

However, just like stative predicates, perfect VPs cannot be used in the progressive: (36) *I am loving ice cream. (37) *Matilda is having finished writing the letter. (cf. Chomsky, 1957).

Katz (2003) re-examines the question systematically and discusses the results of “classical” stativity tests on perfect sentences. These tests generally reveal that in contrast to eventive predicates, stative predicates are always non-agentive, have a “present orientation” and are temporally homogeneous. When applied to sentences containing a VP in the perfect, Katz finds a positive result: perfect sentences exhibit the behavior expected of stative sentences. Where results had been unclear, Katz re-examines scope issues within the sentence. For instance, using an agentive adverbial such as “intentionally” in a perfect sentence is acceptable, thus suggesting that the sentence is non-stative. However, Katz (p. 207) argues, the adverbial modifies the event denoted by the lexical verb, not that denoted by the perfect construction, as shown by the unacceptability of (38b): (38) a. Hans has kissed Lin intentionally. b. ??Hans intentionally has kissed Lin.

Katz finds that perfect clauses have a present orientation, like other stative clauses: (39) Thelma believed Hans to??kiss/love Lin. (p. 209) (40) Thelma believed Hans to have kissed Lin. (p. 211)

Other commonalities between stative and perfect predicates include the fact that both have an epistemic interpretation when used as a complement of must, while eventive predicates have a deontic interpretation:


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(41) a. You must love Lin. b. You must kiss Lin. c. You must have kissed Mary. (pp. 210–211)

Both stative and perfect predicates acquire a deontic interpretation when a future temporal adverbial is added to the sentence (as in “You must love /have kissed Mary by the time I call”). In addition, only statives can combine with adverbs such as still and no longer. However, as seen in section 2, perfect VPs do not combine well with such adverbs, whereas resultative constructions do. Here, Katz follows Parsons (1990) in proposing that the reason for such incompatibility lies in the fact that perfect predicates are timeless. While Katz acknowledges that there are examples where the perfect denotes non-permanent states, perfect states are in his view usually permanent, and this fact restricts the use of certain adverbials with perfects. There are nonetheless events which by their nature will yield non-permanent perfect states, a point also made by Portner (2003), and others. The present orientation of stative and perfect predicates also results in discourse properties that differentiate them from eventive predicates: they do not move narration in time, but rather provide “background” information. The temporal homogeneity of states makes them compatible with adverbials such as for-phrases, but not with expressions like “in X time”. If we accept that perfect clauses are stative, we still need to account for the variability of the state they denote, namely a clear result of an event (especially when telic verbs are used), or any consequence that is relevant to the topic discussed, at S or any R. More generally, and regardless of whether an aspectual and/or temporal analysis of the perfect is chosen, pragmatic factors also need to be taken into account, and we turn to these now.

4. The Pragmatics of the Perfect Starting our discussion of the pragmatics of the perfect with temporal approaches, Portner (2003) proposes that a PP sentence presupposes that the eventuality it describes is in the Extended-Now established by the context. It also introduces a “modal presupposition” of a relation of epistemic necessity between the general question that is debated in the discourse (i.e., the topic), and its answer: (42) A sentence S of the form PERFECT (ϕ) presupposes: ∃q[ANS(q) & P(p,q)] (p. 500)

In the above, p is the proposition expressed by ϕ, the property ANS is true of any question which the speaker of sentence S is trying to answer, thus the operator P is similar to an epistemic must. P(p,q) therefore says that the proposition p, given some conversational background, is necessarily an answer to a question that is part of the current conversation. This presupposition may result in a causal relationship being established with material that is in the conversational background. Take for instance sentence (43):


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(43) Mary has read Middlemarch.

(43) can be understood as the cause for Mary understanding Eliot’s style in a context where someone is looking for an explanation of this author’s style. The reasoning goes as follows: it is established in the conversation that “[i]f someone who isn’t stupid reads an author’s book, they understand her style; Mary is smart; George Eliot wrote Middlemarch” (p. 500). By adding the proposition expressed by “Mary has read Middlemarch,” the proposition that Mary can explain Elliot’s style is entailed and answers the question asked. The relation here between the reading and the understanding is one of causation, with the understanding being a result of her reading. This causal relation obtains with resultative perfects, where the event referred to in the sentence also provides evidence for some current state. Alternatively, other types of relations may be established, such as evidentiary ones (as in “The Earth has been hit by giant asteroids before” being used as evidence to answer the question “is the Earth in danger of being struck by giant asteroids?”). Nishiyama and Koenig (2004) argue against a purely temporal semantics for perfects on the grounds that it fails to relate the event to its reference time, and they enrich their stative analysis using a neo-Gricean approach. They modify Kamp and Reyle’s (1993) representation of perfect sentences using DRT and give a different definition of what they term “perfect state.” For them, a perfect sentence introduces (i) an eventuality (ev) whose temporal trace τ precedes a reference time r (τ (ev) ≺ r), as well as (ii) a perfect state s, overlapping with r (τ (s) ο r). The state s is a free variable represented in the DRS as X(s), where X’s value must be inferable from an occurrence of ev. The mechanisms for providing the pragmatic inference are based on the informativeness or I-principle (Levinson, 2000), where a speaker chooses the less informative utterance if there is a choice, and the hearer enriches it to derive the most specific information, based on world knowledge. Such information needs to be inferable from the occurrence of the event “in normal contexts,” and this is meant to avoid the problem arising from a representation of the perfect that has a result state simply abutting the event, as in Kamp and Reyle (1993) (see discussion in section 3.3), and where the state can be interpreted as being unrelated to the event. To take an example, sentence (44) can be used to refer to the result of the event [Ken break his leg], as well as to a conversationally implicated reading, [Ken be behind in his work]: (44) Ken has broken his leg. (= q)

The representation is as follows: (45) ∃e∃s[Ken_break_his_leg (e) ∧ X(s) ∧ τ(e) ≺ n ∧ τ(s) o n] a. Ken has broken his leg and Ken’s leg is broken. (= p) X(s) = Ken’s_leg_be_broken (Lexically entailed resultative perfect reading) b. Ken has broken his leg and Ken is behind in his work. (= p´) X(s) = Ken_be_behind_in_his_work (Conversationally implicated resultative reading)


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Nisyiama and Koenig (2006) further sought to find out more specifically what types of rules speakers use to draw such inferences. To this end, they examined over 600 English perfect examples taken from a corpus of newspapers, discussions, conversations, and narrative texts, thus comprising different genres. They find that the most common types of perfect used are the entailed resultative and the continuative perfect. As they point out, such types only require readers/hearers to draw trivial inferences, namely the presumed persistence of a situation, a rule that applies unless specific information indicates otherwise (McDermott, 1982). The other functions of the perfect in the corpus included negotiation of a topic, involving for example a speaker asking whether the addressee has seen a movie/read a book/been to a place. The addressee infers that the speaker wants to talk about such topics. The value of X is the state expressed by a sentence of the type “I want to talk about topic x.” They find that often, the perfect is used to start a conversation, where no shared topic can be presupposed (contra Portner, 2003). The last type of use of the perfect is labeled “commonsense entailment,” and involves the hearer understanding the perfect sentence as conveying evidence for, or explanation of, a situation denoted by a neighboring sentence in the discourse. The value of the variable X in such cases is the state described by another sentence, as illustrated by example (46) below: (46) Iraq still keeps U.S. forces busy, too (=X). U.S. Air Force fighter jets have flown an average of 1,500 missions a month over southern Iraq since 1992, in an effort to make sure Iraq doesn’t violate a no-fly zone or attack its Shiite population. (Graff, 1995–1997, Wall Street Journal 07.01.1996) (Nishiyama and Koenig, 2006, p. 273)

In such cases the perfect is used to establish discourse coherence. Overall, the authors comment that an overwhelming 93.06% of their examples require a very general default rule to assign a value to X (persistence, general expectations regarding speech acts). Only a small number of instances require specific commonsense knowledge rules, as for example in (46) above, and the value of X in such cases is found in an immediately preceding or following sentence. They conclude that “determining the nature of the perfect state posited by theories that treat the perfect as a stativizer is a feasible task.” In addition, the perfect serves a number of discourse functions (introducing the value of X into the discourse, negotiating a topic and establishing discourse coherence). Nishiyama and Koenig’s study thus also shows properties of the perfect in discourse and is one of relatively few recent attempts at connecting the meaning of this tense with the discourse context in which it occurs. Other studies that have specifically examined use of the perfect in relation to rhetorical relations are briefly outlined below. We now turn to studies relating perfect usage to the rhetorical structure of discourse, following the work of Asher and Lascarides (2003). Earlier attempts at predicting temporal order focused on the aspectual nature of eventualities: for instance Kamp and Rohrer (1983) had observed that events and states have different behavior in discourse. Thus, (a) and (b) in example (47), continuing the discourse after the first clause, describe an eventuality that is posterior to, and overlapping with that of the first one, respectively:


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(47) Matilda entered the building. a. A man gave her directions to the conference room. b. A man was standing in the hall.

In (47), (a) describes an event and the narration moves forward in time; (b) describes a state which is understood to overlap with the event described in the first clause. However, this observation is too general, as there are many counterexamples. In (48) the second clause describes a state, yet this state is understood to obtain after the event denoted by the first clause: (48) Matilda switched off the light. The room was pitch dark.

Asher and Lascarides (2003) thus proposed that the temporal order of eventualities described in discourse is inferred from rhetorical or discourse relations, which are viewed as types of speech acts (for more detail, see Caudal, this volume). The default relation is that of narration, which leads to the inference of temporal progression, and another relation, that of explanation, also leads to a similar inference. Other relations, such as elaboration, lead to the inference of temporal inclusion of the eventuality denoted by a clause in that denoted by the preceding clause (Caudal and Ritz, forthcoming). The patterns are summarized below in Figure 31.2: Given the semantics of the English PP, we expect that it will not be found in clauses that are part of narration, result or explanation, as it is not used to express temporal progression.

Relation

NARRATION ( , )

Dean came in. Matilda greeted him.

(e < e )

EXPLANATION ( , )

Dean fell. Matilda pushed him.