The Perfect Time Span

Abstract

My first teacher in linguistics, Veronika Ehrich, suggested a couple of years ago a short term paper on the Swedish present perfect. Now, it has become a thesis (being short was never my strong side). I am very much indebted to her.

When-questions and tense in Inquisitive Semantics

“…Finally, I note that the observation about multiple-time answers is supported by similar judgments in Swedish, a language that in the relevant tense-related matters is quite similar to English (e.g. the present perfect puzzle; Rothstein 2008). 3…”

“…The present perfect restriction is reminiscent of the Present Perfect Puzzle, i.e. the incompatibility of the present perfect with so-called p(ositional)-specific past time adverbials (such as yesterday) in English, but not in various other languages including Dutch (see Klein 1992;Portner 2003;Pancheva & von Stechow 2004;Rothstein 2008 among others). Rothstein's (2008: §3.5) solution to the puzzle is based on a mismatch between the present perfect's non-specific semantics and the specific semantics of p-specific adverbials.…”

“…It is worth noting that many (recent) works on the present perfect, and on tense and aspect generally, use a DRT framework, where in other domains of semantics this is perhaps less common. The advantage is that events and times can be introduced as discourse referents in order to explain the complicated discourse-level behavior of tense (de Swart 2007;Rothstein 2008;Nishiyama & Koenig 2010;Kamp, Reyle & Rossdeutscher 2015). Inq D B connects better to this approach in the literature, as it preserves the notion of a discourse referent.…”

“…I assume a PTS-based semantics for the present perfect(Iatridou, Anagnostopoulou & Izvorski 2001;Rothstein 2008):(22) a. The present perfect introduces an interval t = [LB, RB] (the perfect time span, PTS), and asserts that the event time E is somewhere within t.b.…”

Perfect States

“…The studies that address the stativity of the Perfect are not very numerous. There are some mentions in Vet (1980), Vlach (1981Vlach ( , 1993, Harris (1982), Dik (1987), Moens (1987), Mittwoch (1988Mittwoch ( , 1995, Moens & Steedman (1988), Parsons (1990), Smith (1991), Kamp & Reyle (1993), Baar (1994), Bache (1994), ter Meulen (1995), van Eijck & Kamp (1997, Giorgi & Pianesi (1997), Depraetere (1998), de Swart (1998, Portner (2003) and Rothstein (2008), among others. However, as far as I know, the topic is dealt with in depth only in the papers by Katz (2003), Nishiyama & * A previous version of this paper was presented at the Research Workshop on Tense and Aspect (Faculty of Arts, Ciudad Real, 18-19, september, 2014).…”