The Uses of the English Perfect

The English perfect, a "phase" or relative tense, indicates that the situation described in a clause is relevant to the situation described in a chronologically later clause or time Grammarians of modern English have been faced with the problem of reconciling this meaning of the perfect with its disparate uses-to describe situations that have ended, that have not ended, or that arc indeterminate as to ending before the later clauses or times.This paper shows that the three uses arise from the co-occurrence of perfect with information outside the clause and with noun, verb, adverbial, and negation structures within the clause In addition, the paper presents evidence-from elicitation testing that these structures affect the uses and that speakers of English make and respond to these uses

Adverbial · Dependent clause · Gerund · Linguistics · Meaning (existential) · Negation · Noun · Relative clause · Sentence · Verb · Lexicography and Language Studies · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Philosophy · Psychology · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation

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