This paper builds on previous work and aims to
examine one of the most striking differences between the uses of the
present perfect in languages such as Catalan and English, namely, a
hodiernal (‘today’) reading of the perfect available under certain
conditions in these Romance languages but not in English. I will
specifically look into (1) the competition between tenses, (2) the
role of temporal modification, and (3) the present tense. Taking
into account the semantics of the present tense and a split of the
perfect time interval and the reference time as in Pancheva & von Stechow
(2004), I will claim that the main difference that
distinguishes the hodiernal reading is due to a possible
specification of the event time on a fixed position on the time
line.