The Present Perfect Puzzle

Klein, Wolfgang

doi:10.2307/415793

Cited by 284 publications

(248 citation statements)

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“…The Vedic aorist and perfect divide among themselves all the readings (23a-d) of the English perfect, 26 plus another, the stative present perfect: Opinions are divided on whether there are several structurally and semantically distinct kinds of perfect (McCawley 1971, Mittwoch 1988, Michaelis 1994 or a single perfect which receives several pragmatic interpretations (McCoard 1978, Matthews 1989, Declerck 1991, Klein 1992. Vedic strongly supports the former view.…”

Section: Perfect Aspectsupporting

confidence: 56%

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Aspect and Event Structure in Vedic

Singh¹,

Dasgupta²,

Mohanan³

1998

The Yearbook of South Asian Languages and Linguistics (1998)

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Sanskrit presents a classic case of the evolution of aspect to tense. 1 For Proto-Indo-European, the aorist and perfect are reconstructed as purely aspectual categories, with respectively perfective and stative value. 2 In the language described by Pān . ini and used in the Brāhman . a literature, on the other hand, the aorist serves as a general past tense, while the imperfect and the perfect designate remote or historical past, the perfect being furthermore restricted to events not witnessed by the speaker. 3 In the intervening stage of Vedic Sanskrit, the past tenses show a complex mix of temporal, aspectual, and discourse functions. On top of that, Rigvedic retains the injunctive, a chameleon-like category of underspecified finite verbs whose many uses partly overlap with those of the past tenses. The present study of the Rigvedic system is offered as a preliminary step towards the reconstruction and theoretical interpretation of this aspect-to-tense trajectory.The issues of tense/aspect theory that this forces us to face are of considerable interest in their own right as well. The "two-dimensional" framework introduced by Reichenbach (1947) has proved illuminating for English and other languages, 4 but its application to Vedic Sanskrit runs into a serious problem. It cannot provide a unitary representation for the aorist or for the perfect, or even distinguish them from each other in terms of the primitives that it provides. A less obvious variant of this problem arises even in English, where the distinction that Sanskrit makes overtly in the morphology appears covertly in the syntax. The solution I propose in this paper involves two refinements. The first is to specify, as part of the representation of certain tense/aspect categories, a particular assignment of the verbal predicate's event structure to the parameters that define their temporal relations. The second is to assume that general categories are blocked by specific categories, a move fairly standard in modern morphology (and, of course, in Pān . inian grammar), but so far not exploited in the analysis of tense. With these added tools, the theory can make sense of most of the intricate data of Vedic, and succeeds in relating its seemingly exotic 1 Thanks to Cleo Condoravdi and Henriette de Swart for their searching comments on a draft. Naturally I am responsible for any remaning errors.

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Section: Perfect Aspectsupporting

confidence: 56%

“…These data pose a famous problem for the theory of tense (Klein 1992). The ambiguity of the past perfect illustrated in (50) has been taken to show that in the representation of the past perfect, redisplayed in (51a), the adverb can associate either with the reference time R (reading 1) or with the event time E (reading 2).…”

Section: The Past Perfectmentioning

confidence: 99%

Aspect and Event Structure in Vedic

Singh¹,

Dasgupta²,

Mohanan³

1998

The Yearbook of South Asian Languages and Linguistics (1998)

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“…All are well aware of the problems with Reichenbach's original framework and make use of an influential proposal to improve on Reichenbach's S,R,E-system: Klein (1992Klein ( , 1995Klein ( , 2009). Klein introduced the notion of topic time as a correction on Reichenbach's R. Topic time is "the time about which something is asserted (or asked) " (2009: 47) or "the time span to which the claim made on a given occasion is constrained" (1992: 535).…”

Section: Dyadic Branching and Ternary Partitionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…15 Therefore, we start our investigation with contrasting the sentences in (8)-(11). 13 The domain j is neither the situation time (= run time) of k nor the topic time in the sense of Klein (1992); see Verkuyl (2008: 55-60 and passim) for a detailed argumentation. 14 Focusing on past tense forms, we will ignore the POST-operator in (3b) referring to Broekhuis and Verkuyl (2014) for the interpretation of POST as a modal operator.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A binary approach to Spanish tense and aspect: on the tense battle about the past

González

Verkuyl

2017

Borealis

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ABSTRACT. The present paper aims at accounting for the Spanish Imperfecto, Perfecto, Pluscuamperfecto and the Indefinido by applying three binary tense oppositions: Present vs Past, Synchronous vs Posterior and Imperfect(ive) vs Perfect(ive). For the sixteen Spanish tense forms under analysis a binary approach leads to covering twelve of them. Their relation with the preterital forms outside the range of the three oppositions is accounted for by two surgical operations: (a) the notion of Imperfect(ive) is severed from the notion of ongoing progress by restricting it to underinformation about completion and by seeing continuous tense forms as involving a more complex semantics; (b) the notion of (non-)stative is strictly severed from interference of information coming from the arguments of a verb. These theoretical moves make the way free for a formal-semantic insight into the interaction of Spanish tense and aspect. It also paves the way for a principled distinction between completion and anteriority. Restricted to tense forms pertaining to the past, our analysis sheds light on the struggle for survival of tense forms outside the binary system. Keywords: tense, aspect, perfecto, pluscuamperfecto, imperfecto, indefinido, completion, aorist, anteriority, stative, nonstative, discrete, continuous, progressive, terminative, durative RESUMEN. El presente trabajo pretende describir y explicar las siguientes formas verbales del castellano: Imperfecto, Perfecto, Pluscuamperfecto e Indefinido aplicando tres oposiciones temporales binarias: Presente vs Pasado, Sincrónico vs Posterior e Imperfecto/imperfectivo vs Perfecto/perfectivo. Este acercamiento binario cubre doce de las dieciséis formas temporales del castellano analizadas. La relación entre las formas verbales que entran en el sistema binario y las formas de pretérito que no entran en el sistema se explica por dos operaciones quirúrgicas: (a) la noción de Imperfecto/imperfectivo se separa de la noción de progresivo continuo, restringiendo el valor del Imperfecto/imperfectivo a la subinformación sobre su terminación e implicando una semántica más compleja para las formas temporales progresivas; (b) la noción de (no) estatividad está estrictamente separada de la interferencia de la información aspectual procedente de los argumentos de un verbo. Estos movimientos teóricos dan vía libre a una comprensión formal-semántica de la interacción del tiempo y del aspecto en castellano. También allana el camino para una distinción argumentada entre las nociones de terminación y anterioridad. Limitado a formas verbales del pasado, nuestro análisis ilumina la batalla por la supervivencia de las formas temporales fuera del sistema binario.

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“…Este desajuste obedecería a que el pretérito simple, al ser perfectivo, impone un foco externo (Smith, 1997) sobre una situación que, siendo estativa, no tiene inicio ni fin propios, es decir, es ilimitada. Alternativamente, se ha propuesto que el perfectivo focaliza ya el límite final (Klein, 1992;1994), ya uno de los dos límites (Fábregas, 2015) de una situación dada. Sea cual fuere el caso, todas estas teorías predicen un desajuste entre perfectivos y estativos.…”

Section: Valores Aspectuales De Supounclassified

Factores Que Inciden en La Determinación Del Aspecto De Situación De Supo

Godoy

Vergara

2017

Linguist.lit.

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Resumen: En pretérito simple (supo), el verbo de estado saber modifica su aspecto de situación a logro ('empezar a saber') o a estado acotado ('saber durante cierto tiempo'), lo que sugiere que este cambio no depende solo del operador de tiempo perfectivo. El presente trabajo, a partir de un análisis de corpus, muestra qué elementos léxicos, gramaticales y discursivos inciden en la determinación del aspecto en situación en supo. La interpretación específica depende de propiedades del momento de referencia temporal en que se localiza la situación.Palabras claves: gramática española, aspecto de situación, coerción aspectual, tiempo de referencia, contexto lingüístico. FACTORS AFFECTING THE DETERMINATION OF THE SITUATION ASPECT OF SUPOAbstract: Spanish stative verb saber (to know) can change its lexical aspect to achievement ('begin to know') or to bounded state ('knowing for some time'), when it is in simple past tense (supo). This suggests that the type of situation does not depend only on the perfective operator. This paper, based on the analysis of 232 cases collected from the current Spanish language corpus of the Real Academia Española (CREA), shows that lexical, grammatical, and discursive meaning affect the determination of the type of situation of supo. The specific interpretation depends on the properties of the reference time in which the situation is located.

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The Present Perfect Puzzle

Cited by 284 publications

References 1 publication

Aspect and Event Structure in Vedic

Aspect and Event Structure in Vedic

A binary approach to Spanish tense and aspect: on the tense battle about the past

Factores Que Inciden en La Determinación Del Aspecto De Situación De Supo

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