Present Perfect

On the Present Perfect Puzzle

German children's productivity with tense morphology: the Perfekt (present perfect).

Two nonce-word studies examined German-speaking children's productivity with the Perfekt (present perfect) from 2;6 to 3;6. The German Perfekt consists of the past participle of the main verb and an inflected form of an auxiliary (either haben 'have' or sein 'be'). In Study 1, nonce verbs were either introduced in the infinitival form, and children (seventy-two children, aged 2;6 to 3;6) were t...

A puzzle about until and the Present Perfect

The anomaly is quite puzzling in the context of the quite standard assumptions that (a) perfect eventualities denote result states (McCoard 1978, Dowty 1979, Vlach 1983, Kamp and Reyle 1993), and (b) UNTIL is a stative modifier. Both assumptions would predict unobstructed compatibility between UNTIL phrases and the perfect. The observed incompatibility becomes even more intriguing when we see t...

A Reichenbachian Account of the Interaction of the Present Perfect with Temporal Adverbials

One puzzling aspect of the present perfect is that temporal adverbials are sometimes acceptable in a present perfect sentence and sometimes not, as illustrated by the examples below: (1) a. Martha has lived in Boston for ve years. b. For ve years Martha has lived in Boston. (2) a. Chris has left at midnight. b. #At midnight Chris has left. (3) a. John has been in the bathtub until noon. b. #Unt...

Interference in the Acquisition of the Present Perfect Continuous: Implica- tions of a Grammaticality Judgment Test

Linguistic interference in the acquisition of tenses has remained a fertile area for extensive studies on the teaching of English to speakers of other languages. Congruent with previous studies, this study aims to find out whether errors in the learning of a grammatical category is more ascribable to negative transfer resulting from learners’ first language or the rules governing its use in the...