On the Cross-Linguistic Variation of ‘One-Step Past-Referring’ Tenses

This paper proposes a new look at the so-called ‘present-perfect puzzle’. It suggests that it is in fact part of a bigger problem, concerning all tenses in a language situating an event one step before the moment of utterance. I argue that present perfects compete with simple past tenses, and that the distribution of these tenses shows signs of the impact of this competition. The outcome of the competition is argued to be heavily dependent on which of the two tense-forms is the default. A pragmatic theory is proposed which accounts for the reduced distribution of the present perfect in languages like English and Spanish, and the reduced distribution of the simple past tense in languages like French and German.