Perfects as Feature Shifting Operators

The original purpose of what follows was to deal with a problem that arises for ‘pure result state’ accounts of the perfect, which treat perfects as operators that transform event and state descriptions into descriptions of corresponding result states and make these the target of location in time by tenses and temporal adverbs. In the form in which we endorsed this approach for many years ((Kamp and Reyle 1993), (Reyle, Rossdeutscher and Kamp 2007)) it entails that a sentence like I have submitted my essay today can be true even if the submission itself took place before today. Some speakers argue that this sentence has a reading on which can be true on such a scenario. or others this is hard or impossible. But from all the evidence available to us on this point it seems to us that the sentence must have a reading on which it entails that ms. was submitted on the day of utterance. (It is a further matter, but one which does not directly affect the need for a correction to our earlier result state account, whether the sentence does or does not have an interpretation that does not require this.)