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The Present Perfect Puzzle

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2026

Wolfgang Klein
Wolfgang Klein*
Affiliation:
Max-Planck-Institut für Psycholinguistik
*
Max-Planck-Institut für Psycholinguistik, PB 310, NL-6500 AH Nijmegen, The Netherlands
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Abstract

In Chris has left York, it is clear that the event in question, Chris’s leaving York, has occurred in the past, for example yesterday at ten. Why is it impossible, then, to make this event time more explicit by such an adverbial, as in * Yesterday at ten, Chris has left York? Any solution to this puzzle crucially hinges on the meaning assigned to the perfect, and the present perfect in particular. Two such solutions, a scope solution and the ‘current relevance’ solution, are discussed and shown to be inadequate. A new, strictly compositional analysis of the English perfect is suggested, and it is argued that the incompatibility of the present perfect and most past tense adverbials has neither syntactic nor semantic causes but follows from a simple pragmatic constraint, called here the POSITION-DEFINITENESS CONSTRAINT. The same constraint also makes an utterance such as At ten, Chris had left at nine pragmatically odd, even if Chris indeed had left at nine, so that the utterance is true.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 68 , Issue 3 , September 1992 , pp. 525 - 552
Copyright
Copyright © 1992 by Linguistic Society of America

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Footnotes

*

I am grateful to the members of the project The expression of time and space’ at the MPI for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, for many helpful discussions; in particular. I would like to mention Manfred Bierwisch, Melissa Bowerman, Veronika Ehrich, and Clive Perdue. I also wish to thank Arnim von Stechow for most helpful suggestions. I have also greatly benefited from a number of excellent comments by an anonymous reviewer; they have led to a considerable revision of some parts of the paper. None of them should be held responsible for my views.

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