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The (Temporal) Semantics and (Modal) Pragmatics of the Perfect

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Abstract

The English perfect involves two fundamental components of meaning: a truth-conditional one involving temporal notions and a current relevance presupposition best expressed in terms drawn from the analysis of modality. The proposal made here draws much for the Extended Now theory (McCoard 1978 and others), but improves on it by showing that many aspects of the perfect's meaning may be factored out into independent semantic or pragmatic principles.

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  1. Department of Linguistics, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, 20057, USA

    Paul Portner

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Portner, P. The (Temporal) Semantics and (Modal) Pragmatics of the Perfect. Linguistics and Philosophy 26, 459–510 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1024697112760

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