2005 Fiscal Year Final Research Report Summary
A Research on the Semantic Mechanism on the English present perfect with a Special Respect to the Synchronic and Diachronic Environment of European Present Perfects.
| Project/Area Number |
15520313
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| Research Category |
Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
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| Allocation Type | Single-year Grants |
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| Section | 一般 |
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| Research Field |
English linguistics
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| Research Institution | Kyushu Institute of Technology |
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Principal Investigator |
GOTO Mariko Kyushu Institute of Technology, Faculty of Computer Science and Systems Engineering, Associate Professor, 情報工学部, 助教授 (20189773)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2003 – 2005
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| Keywords | HAVE-Perfects / Perfect Participle / Tense-Aspect / Present Tense morpheme / Have or Possession / Immediacy / Imperfectivity / Speech-Act Situation |
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| Research Abstract |
The central claims of this report are 1) that the English present perfect is in the present tense, 2) that it profiles the speaker's intended present situation denoted by HAVE, elaborated by the participle, and 3) understanding the situation profiled by HAVE requires the recognition of discourse and the contextual factors in the speech act situation.
The present perfect is notorious for the difficult descriptive problems it poses. These problems ultimately have arisen from a failure to properly appreciate the relationship between the tense morpheme and the mechanism of the perfect construction itself. The first cause is the accepted picture that the present perfect describes a past event. One of the effects that leads us to this view is the typological fact that many European present perfect forms are known to express past events. The other is that the English tense has not been given an account satisfactory enough to explicate the nature of the tense morpheme attached to the present perfect. The second fundamental cause is the lack of sufficient awareness of the contextual factors crucially involving with use of the present perfect.
This research argues that the English present perfect can be considered to express a present situation because
(1)the English present perfect has been outside the influence of the semantic change from present to past which occurred in the central Europe and (2)the tense morpheme attached to the construction functions to indicate that the content of the clause holds at the present time identified by the speaker. Second, it argues that once tense, have, the perfect participle and the interaction of these are properly elucidated, the above characterization proves remarkably adequate in accounting for its usage.
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