Table of contents
Figures and tables vii
General introduction viii-x
Chapter 1 – The literature on the English Present Perfect
1.0 Introduction 1
1.1 The main ‘pillars’ 2
1.1.1 O. Jespersen 2 1.1.2 H. Reichenbach 4 1.1.3 Z. Vendler 5 1.1.4 M. Joos 7 1.1.5 F. R. Palmer 8 1.1.6 J. Lyons 9 1.2 Different traditions 11
1.2.1 Tense logic and philosophy 11
1.2.2 The historical-diachronic approach 17
1.2.3 The typological perspective 20
1.2.4 Structural-functionalist analyses 25
1.2.5 Semantics and pragmatics 28
1.2.5.1 The ‘current relevance’ issue 28 1.2.5.2 McCawley’s four understandings 30 1.2.5.3 The ‘hot-news’ interpretation 31
1.2.5.4 ‘Focus spaces’ 32
1.2.5.5 The cognitivist view 33
1.2.5.6 Mental spaces 36
1.2.6 The textual dimension 37
1.3 Conclusion 43
Chapter 2 – The theoretical framework: markedness, complexity and resultativeness
2.0 Introduction 50
2.1 The notion(s) of markedness 51
2.1.1 Markedness in phonology 52
2.1.2 Grammatical markedness 54
2.1.2.1 Markedness in morphology 55 2.1.2.2 Syntactic markedness 56
2.1.3 Markedness in semantics 59
2.1.4 Markedness revisited and explained 62 2.2 A semiotic approach to markedness 64 2.2.1 Outline of semiotic principles 65
2.2.1.2 Indexicality 66
2.2.1.3 Transparency 67
2.2.1.4 Biuniqueness 68
2.2.1.5 Figure and ground 69
2.2.2 Application of semiotic principles 70 2.2.2.1 The evaluation of markedness in texts 70 2.2.2.2 Markedness and the lexicon 73 2.3 Markedness, complexity and difficulty 75 2.3.1 Language as a complex dynamical system 77
2.4 The notion of resultativeness 78
2.5 Conclusion 81
Chapter 3 – The Present Perfect semantic ‘space’
3.0 Introduction 86
3.1 Theoretical premises and terminological choices 87
3.1.1 Bounds and phases 88
3.1.2 The evolution of aspect theories 91
3.1.3 Terminological proposal 96
3.1.3.1 Actionality 97
3.1.3.2 Aspectuality 98
3.1.3.3 Valency patterns and verbal semantic classes 98
3.2 Corpus data 102
3.2.1 The British National Corpus (BNC) 102
3.2.2 Other corpora of English 103
3.3 Present Perfect readings: frequencies of occurrence 103 3.4 Lexico-syntactic and semantic contours 108
3.4.1 The Resultative Perfect 110
3.4.2 The Perfect of Recent Past 118
3.4.3 The Continuative Perfect 120
3.4.4 The Experiential Perfect 125
3.5 Conclusion 127
Chapter 4 – The Present Perfect as a temporal-aspectual micro-system
4.0 Introduction 131
4.1 Markedness and complexity 131
4.1.1 The Resultative Perfect 132
4.1.2 The Perfect of Recent Past 137
4.1.3 The Continuative Perfect 138
4.1.4 The Experiential Perfect 141
4.2 Factual vs. non-factual results 144
4.3 Non-standard uses 146
4.4 Conclusion 150
Appendix 157
