9 avril 2019
https://www.openedition.org/12554 , info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
Éric Corre, « Quelques réflexions sur le Present Perfect Puzzle », Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, ID : 10670/1.cjgmv5
Eric Corre hypothesizes that the Present Perfect Puzzle (PPP) can find a proper resolution if one adopts a multiple perspective on the Present Perfect (PP). Since Klein’s (1992) definition of Topic Time, it has been accepted in the literature that the p-definiteness constraint, a pragmatic one, accounts for part of the PPP. The author tries to show that aspectual constraints are also at work: being marked as the ‘posttime’ of an event, a PP form installs, as it were, the event in the p-definite present of the speaker, cancelling thereby any paradigmatic contrast with yesterday-type adverbials. More recent research has shifted the focus from strictly aspectual and temporal parameters to evidential ones: in that view, the perfect vs. past morphologies in some languages clearly signal the event’s inclusion in, or exclusion from, the ‘world’ of the speaker, allowing for effects such as testimonial implication, speaker’s personal deduction, etc, for the English PP.